


Let's Try Another Kind of Peace

by DreamerInSilico



Series: courage to savor me down to my core [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Injury Recovery, M/M, Medical Procedures, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Relationship Discussions, and baggage, discussion of canon-typical violence and cannibalism, discussion of suicidal impulses, in which the author attempts some degree of medical realism, rating will go up as well but not for a while, so much baggage, why, why did you have to have him get shot in the gut bryan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2020-05-19 03:12:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19348345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/pseuds/DreamerInSilico
Summary: "Can't live with him, can't live without him."  When the sea spits them back out, one of those things is apparently going to have to change.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the wonderful [TiggyMalvern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiggymalvern), without whose assistance I probably would never have stopped fretting over the medical details enough to start posting this! 
> 
> I'm a few years late to the party, but this is my inevitable take on post-fall Hannigram doing their best to stay alive and work out their bullshit enough to find their way to a stable relationship. It follows my previous fic, [Best of Cruel Intentions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17773958), which spans the car ride from the attack on the convoy to the cliff house in TWOTL - Will and Hannibal's conversation there will affect their interactions in this story (probably not so drastically that this one won't make sense without having read the other, though I am rather proud of it and would love if you give it a read!). 
> 
> There will eventually be smut of the loving and enthusiastically consensual variety, and the rating will go up/tags will get added when we get there (because it's going to be a while and I don't want people to click on Chapter 1 with the wrong idea of what they're getting). 
> 
> Title is a lyric from "The Sparrows and the Nightingales," by Wolfsheim, which is honestly a great Hannigram song all over.

When Will hits the water, it occurs to him to be afraid - not like the moment before, on the cliff, when everything was just too overwhelming and wonderfully horrific, but afraid as in possessing some remaining shred of self-preservation instinct, and knowing that the time to employ it was… well, more like three seconds ago, but now is all he has to work with.

He’s disoriented for a few moments of flailing limbs, but even injured, he’s certainly a competent swimmer, and the fresh adrenaline spike keeps the sharp bite of salt water in deep wounds mostly in the background. Then he surfaces, gasping in the lightly choppy sea, and it occurs to him to be afraid for another reason: he can’t see Hannibal anywhere around him, has no idea where he is in relation to himself. (The irony of this fear will occur to him only later.)

Hannibal was a very strong swimmer, three years ago. But he just spent three years locked away in the BSHCI, and he has at least one injury more serious than any of Will’s and what if -

Hannibal breaks the surface nearby, choking on a wavelet that hits him in the face as he does so, but he’s apparently got enough fight left in him for now to maybe have a chance. When he stabilizes treading water, his eyes find Will, and he jerks his head in Will’s direction. “That way,” he coughs, and begins to swim. The briefest, most utilitarian of statements, so un-Hannibal-like. ‘That way’ is apparently the shortest route to usable shoreline.

Will obeys, and somehow they do manage to drag their still-bleeding bodies out of the ocean. He catches Hannibal without thinking about it, when Hannibal staggers as he tries to stand, and thankfully he catches him on the shoulder that didn’t get stabbed, or they both might have fallen down and never made it upright again. The path that winds back up the bluff is made of loose, fine pebbles, and the glass-bead sound of them crunching and scattering at their shuffling steps twines with their labored breathing and the squelching of soaked clothes into a very particular harmony that Will will always recall with vivid clarity, in the future, though that’s not what he’s thinking about, now.

He’s thinking about what sorts of equipment Hannibal might or might not keep at the cliff house, and how he _sincerely fucking hopes_ the man has a stash of antibiotics around, in particular, or Will’s going to end up having to break into a pharmacy after hours, sooner rather than later. (Painkillers of some prescription-only sort seem like a fairly safe bet, at least.) He’s thinking about how much time they have before Jack finds them here.

He’s not thinking about how he very much does not want either of them to be here when the FBI inevitably does show up.

They make it into the house again, after a near-catastrophic moment on a shallow step that Will saw just in time, dripping bloody seawater all over the beautiful floor. Will distantly wishes that they could prevent themselves from leaving evidence like this, that they made it back out of the ocean after falling in, but there is absolutely no way for them to do that right now, so either they’ll have time for a clean-up before they have to flee, or they won’t.

“Tell me where to help you sit down, and then where to find your stash of supplies.” Will doesn’t mean to, but he’s very nearly using his stray-soothing voice, raw as his throat feels from recent exertion. Hopefully Hannibal won’t consciously pick up on that. Something about the swim-stagger up here has cleared his head, or maybe it was just the remembrance that he really does want both of them to keep breathing.

“The basement, for both.” He sounds exhausted, but his tone otherwise betrays very little of the pain Will knows he must be in right now.

“You can manage the stairs?”

“Yes.”

Will has difficulty containing his skepticism, but if Hannibal Lecter says he can do something, precedent certainly says that he can.

The stairs in question are too narrow for Will to support him side-by-side, which is probably for the best because he’d been thinking about trying, and fortunately have railings on each side. Will goes first, warily, to be able to at least attempt to break a fall if Hannibal does lose his balance, but they do manage to get down without mishap.

And _of course_ this house has a Creepy Medical Room, too. Directly across from the wine cellar, as one does. Will’s lips try to form a smile, but the stab wound in his cheek puts a halt to that activity pretty quickly.

There’s a steel table, but Hannibal goes for one of the vinyl chairs, surprisingly cheap and mundane for a piece of furniture in one of his houses, but Will supposes it’s technically a bolthole and if you’re going to sew up your own injuries, might as well be sitting on something softer and easier to get on and off than the operating table. Now he’s watching Will with an expression that contains both exhausted resignation and wary curiosity, and how both those things can exist in the same, minimally-mobile face at the same time is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s just that Will’s crawled so far into his head he doesn’t really need the visual anymore.

“Okay, what have we got to deal with?” Will sighs, gingerly trying to strip out of his shirt before giving up as it twinges his shoulder too much, and just casting about for the medical shears.

“Top drawer on the left,” Hannibal offers simply, and that is in fact the drawer he’s after.

He cuts himself out of his sodden shirt, but his eyes keep flicking to assess Hannibal more than his own present action. “Nothing below the waist on me, I don’t think, or at least nothing that needs immediate attention. You?”

“Nothing concerning, no.” The words hold a subtle, different sort of approval than Will is used to hearing from Hannibal, and he _has to_ ignore pondering that in favor of actually making sure neither of them is going to die in the immediate future. At least, of their present injuries. He starts on Hannibal’s shirt.

He doesn’t bother stating that he’s got two knife wounds above the belt; that will be obvious. His face definitely needs stitches; he might be able to get away with a pressure dressing on the shoulder, he thinks, maybe. If the shoulder stab had clipped an artery he’d probably already be dead, and if it had severed tendons, he wouldn’t have been able to use it to drag that same knife through the Dragon’s belly; he should have Hannibal look at it, though.

“Anything serious on you besides the gunshot?” He’s going to check Hannibal over anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. The gunshot is bad enough, though. The fear had taken a break for some minutes as they got themselves here from the ocean, but now it’s back in full force, curling sickly in Will’s stomach.

“No.” Hannibal is still just sort of… watching Will. Which is physically practical, because he shouldn’t be moving around any more than he has to and also Will’s presently at work getting his shirt off, but it’s also strange that he seems content to answer questions and let Will direct how they’re doing this. For the moment, anyway. Or perhaps that’s simply all he _can_ do - his eyes are slitted, face now tight with obvious pain, breathing still laboured and shallow.

If he loses consciousness, they’re probably both screwed.

Will pauses suddenly while peeling away the remains of the sodden grey sweater from Hannibal’s back, and Hannibal turns his head slowly to look at Will, who is staring at the circular scar of a very particular brand between his shoulder blades.

“Mason,” Will says flatly.

“A memento of our final time under his hospitality, yes.”

Everyone who tries to kill Hannibal seems to have a problem with playing with their food a bit too much beforehand, Will muses grimly. Except maybe himself - his problem, such as it is, has always been not actually wanting to kill Hannibal. He resumes his task with methodical, gentle motions, trying to keep his hands from shaking.

“What am I using to clean us up?” Will asks when he’s got the shirt sufficiently removed.

“There is iodine there, by the packages of gauze on the counter. And sterile towels in the box, there.” He indicates the two directions with the motion of a single finger, and Will collects them, ripping into a package of the towels first and handing one to Hannibal.

Hannibal takes it, still watching Will more than what he’s doing as he sponges off blood and salt water.

“Do you want to live, Will?” The question is altogether too bland for the subject matter.

Will’s eyes flick up to fixate on Hannibal’s face, stripped bare by the sudden, bald question. He knows the answer, and it’s almost as overwhelming a _want_ as he had felt before denying that want to pull them over the edge of the cliff. His breath catches in a sob, eyes stinging with more than just the seawater that drips from his hair.

“Yes. I want us both to live,” he whispers. A heartbeat’s pause. “I’m worried about you.”

“A curious sentiment.” Hannibal is wearily dispassionate.

Will offers up the deepest truth he has, right now. “ _I can’t watch you die._ ” He’d thought, maybe, that he could watch Dolarhyde kill Hannibal. That had turned out to be wrong. He had thought, for a heartbeat on the cliffside, that he could kill Hannibal if it took them both down together - an elegant ending to their long, bloody tale.

But no, he’d regretted that basically as soon as he’d hit the water and it wasn’t just instant oblivion. Been frantic to find Hannibal in the ocean.

Fleetingly, he remembers what Reba had to say about her last moments with Dolarhyde. The comparison would sicken him, were he less focused on the target of his present sentiment than he is.

“Then it is quite possible you may need to leave me, soon,” Hannibal says simply, bluntly.

Will understands what Hannibal means, without needing it explained. He’s had first aid training, when he was a cop. Penetrating abdominal trauma is always an emergency. Always potentially lethal. That Hannibal is still alive and conscious after the exertion of killing Dolarhyde and then dragging himself from the ocean says the bullet _probably_ didn't hit any major blood vessels or solid organs, which is good, but it is hard-bordering-on-impossible to punch a hole through the abdomen like that and not damage something important. Without medical intervention, a slow, agonizing death by sepsis is the most likely outcome. And they can’t take Hannibal to a hospital, not without effectively putting him back into custody.

“I'm not leaving you,” he rasps, staring at Hannibal as he almost savagely wipes at his own wounds with iodine-soaked gauze, barely noticing the accompanying flare in the pain. He will defy the possibility, even the necessity, that one of them might leave the other, in this place, in this time.

Hannibal gives him a wary look, that lingers for several seconds. “What if I went back into custody? For treatment. Would you come for me again?”

Will finds himself practically snarling, so many ironic truths tearing at him with that question. It’s hard to breathe, like a part of him is still underwater. “I would. But I don’t think you should. Jack was ready to kill you, right after Dolarhyde, if the official plan had gone through without intervention.” Without Dolarhyde’s intervention. Without Will’s own. It had been no accident that Dolarhyde had known where to intercept the caravan. “I don’t think you’d make it to a hospital, and I don’t even think I trust that you’d make it _in_ one.”

Hannibal’s eyes close, then, slowly, briefly, a resigned acknowledgment that there is only one way forward. He seems to like it as little as Will does. And then he takes it in a completely ridiculous direction. “I should tend your wounds while I am still capable.”

“Hannibal - “

“No, listen to me, Will. Whatever we might do for me, I will get worse before I get better. Let us put this time to its best use. And then we will see what the future may yet hold for us. Yes?”

Will is glaring daggers at Hannibal, but he can see the sense in it. He's not going to be much use, soon, if he lets his shoulder wound get more aggravated than it already is.

“Tell me what to collect for you. I don't want you moving around any more than absolutely necessary.”

 

* * *

 

Lidocaine and over-the-counter analgesics only do so much to take the edge off the pain, especially while Hannibal is working, though Will can seldom feel the needle itself as Hannibal stitches him up. There is, as he had anticipated, a stash of stronger pain meds available, but he has no intention of getting into those until Hannibal is settled in to ( _hopefully_ ) start the healing process, too. It isn't as though Will is any stranger to pain, and he's endured far worse than this, in the past - at Hannibal's hand, no less, but there is no rancor to accompany that thought. Of all the things Will has forgiven or has yet to forgive Hannibal, that one is and was the simplest and easiest.

“You will need to do mobility exercises, once the shoulder has healed,” Hannibal informs him, a hint of his old professional briskness entering his tone and helping Will summon the ghost of a smirk.

“Least I've had a lot of practice with those.” Will rolls his eyes. “What is it about my right shoulder that offends everyone so much, anyway?”

“Better, in some ways, to keep re-injuring the same one, no? It will no doubt be troublesome as you get older, but less so than if the injuries had been distributed evenly, I think.”

“Probably,” Will agrees dryly. “It was already troublesome; least I’m used to it.”

“And I expect you will be a model patient.”

He musters the energy to snort, faintly. “You would be the first to ever predict _that_. But with the exercises, at least, yeah. I get antsy when I can't move right.” Understatement. Historically, his problem with physical therapy has always been a matter of overzealous compliance, rather than the opposite.

Will groans as he sits up, then fixes Hannibal with an unrelenting stare that is sharp to try to cover for his increasing worry, a sick tide through his fatigue. Hannibal is paler, visibly sweating now that he is no longer completely drenched in sea water. He took a stimulant to get him through working on Will, and Will expects that is wearing off.

A large part of Will’s brain is insisting that all it needs is to lie down and sleep forever, but given that that is now officially the scenario they’re trying to avoid, he ardently ignores it, drawing breath to speak again, but halting at the barely-there sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Somehow, his worn-out body manages yet another surge of adrenaline. Of course he hasn’t reclaimed a firearm, yet. And he’d let Dolarhyde’s vicious little knife fall to the patio after it was clear he wouldn’t be getting back up. _Fuck_.

Will pushes himself off the table, unsteady and lightheaded, but able to put himself between Hannibal and the door, starting to cast about for a scalpel or _some_ kind of weapon just as his brain sluggishly notes that neither FBI nor police are ever so very _quiet_ -

Chiyoh appears in front of him, looking as unimpressed as ever. Will nearly staggers back with relief. “This is definitely the happiest I’ve ever been to see you,” he mutters.

“Ahh, Chiyoh.” Hannibal’s still-gloved hand comes up to Will’s back to steady him. “I see you got my message; thank you for coming.”

She ignores both almost-greetings and simply asks, “How bad?” Her eyes slide from Hannibal to Will and back again, narrowing at what she sees.

“Hannibal was shot through the back, lower right abdomen. That’s the worst of it. Obviously didn’t hit a major artery or a solid organ, or he’d already be down and out, but….”

Hannibal picks up his train of thought. “But standard of care for such an injury is peritoneal lavage and exploratory surgery, as it’s unlikely that it is only skin and muscle in want of repair.”

Will raises a hand to his face. Normally the scent of blood lingering on it would bother him, but it’s such a miasma in the air of the room anyway, that it barely registers.

People occasionally do live through injuries like Hannibal’s without major surgery (he thinks, anyway), especially with the aid of antibiotics. But that’s a very perilous die roll to make. They need to buy time to figure out how to get Hannibal professional care, and Chiyoh - who isn’t injured and whose face has not ever been plastered all over national news outlets - should be able to help them do that.

“If you’ve got a way to whisk us out of the country quickly enough to get him to a real hospital, now’s the time to say so,” he hazards, not particularly optimistic about that, and isn’t surprised by the flat stare she gives him in return. “Do you think you can get us some broad-spectrum antibiotics? Probably oral and intravenous?” he hazards. “And blood. We do what we can and then we… figure something out.”

There has to be money that they can access, doesn’t there? He’s having trouble thinking, and that’s not good.

“That… I will try.” And Chiyoh is gone again without another word.

 

* * *

 

The next few hours, Will will barely remember, later.

With some assurance that more help will return eventually, he focuses on the very basics: helping an increasingly pain-hazed Hannibal get minutely more comfortable and clean, and starting an IV for him - which takes Will four tries with his less-than-steady hands, instruction from Hannibal, and a video demonstration from somewhere on the internet. Fluids aren’t a blood transfusion, but they will help, and having the line established makes it easier to administer a low dose of some analgesic that Hannibal has on-hand.

There is an indeterminate amount of pain and worry, and then Chiyoh is back, which is both a relief and the source of another twist of anxiety in Will’s stomach, because now they’re going to need to _do_ a lot more.

She has antibiotics, saline, and fortuitously, a few units of O- blood. (Hannibal had eventually pronounced himself “probably not going to die by exsanguination,” but the blood he’s lost isn’t trivial, and anything to help his overall condition moving forward is a good thing.)

Will remembers the momentary dismay at the need to warm the blood, before Chiyoh just points at the sink, and he turns it into a water bath.

He remembers his horror at the actual moan of pain from Hannibal as they’re attempting to rinse the internal track of his wound with sterile saline. ( _He’d barely grunted, all through their fight with the Dragon._ ) The smell of bile as Hannibal vomits up the meager contents of his stomach a moment later. Wiping Hannibal’s face with a damp towel for him after.

Sharp orders from Chiyoh he doesn’t remember, but must have followed, as she finally, finally begins the necessary sutures on muscle, then skin.

He doesn’t remember when she convinces him to just accept some real pain medication and go to sleep, already, by saying “You are not able to be of use to him like this, and you are annoying me. Go to sleep,” but that’s probably just as well.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will tries to keep Hannibal alive, despite the dire nature of his injuries.

Will wakes slowly, awareness of a thousand points of pain returning before any real comprehension of his circumstances. When he tries to move, one very particular, fiery area at his right shoulder protests ardently, and he begins to reclaim his bearings.

He is lying on a thick cloth - comforter, it seems like? - with a single pillow on a hard floor, and he smells blood and seawater and antiseptic. The lights are blessedly dim. A light blanket covers him, and he’s stripped to still-uncomfortably-damp underwear except for the places covered by gauze and medical tape. There is an IV cannula in his forearm.

“You refused to leave this room for a bed,” comes Chiyoh’s voice, from the corner.

Right. Because this is where Hannibal is. Will looks up with slitted eyes and finds him still on the table, covered in a blanket. Chiyoh wouldn’t have been able to move him by herself, and Will had been in no state to help.

“...Hannibal?” he asks in sluggish syllables. It hurts to work his jaw, and he remembers the stab wound in his cheek.

“Asleep. Feverish. I have given him antibiotics and one opiate dose, but he will need to be awake for decisions, soon.” Her tone is measured and thoughtful and subtly accusatory. “There is water above your head.”

Will reaches - thankfully he remembers to do so with his left hand - and finds the bottle, pushing himself up to a near-sitting position before twisting the cap off gratefully. If not a sympathetic nurse, Chiyoh is at least a thorough one.

“We can’t stay here, can we?” he rasps after gulping down a few swallows.

“I have moved your mess somewhere else. This place will not be safe forever, I think, but it may be for a while.”

“How long have I been out?”

“About four hours. It’s midmorning.”

Fuck, he needs to pee. That’s probably a good thing. “What’s in this?” he asks, gesturing vaguely at the IV.

“Fluids and antibiotics. Hannibal said you needed to finish two units with…” She trails off with a shrug, obviously not remembering or perhaps not wanting to pronounce whatever, precisely, is in it. “That is the second.”

“Okay. Bathroom?” he asks tiredly. His IV bag is hung on the same pole as Hannibal’s. He’s not sure how this is going to work, for a moment, but Chiyoh deftly disconnects the tubing for him and helps him up, before showing him to the nearest washroom. His whole body feels the beating it’s taken recently, every time he moves.

He is left to his own painful devices to find clothing - scavenged from the room where Hannibal had gone to change out of his prison jumpsuit when they’d first arrived, cut for a larger frame than his own - and something to eat. The latter is just a protein bar, as while there is a deep freezer and some self-stable pantry essentials, he isn’t about to spend time and energy on attempting to prepare something, but it’s better than nothing.

He’s distantly surprised that there even _is_ such a thing as a protein bar in a house owned by Hannibal, but given Chiyoh’s prompt arrival, he imagines perhaps she spends some time here, occasionally.

“Finish the bag,” Chiyoh orders him when he returns to the basement, and he nods his assent to being hooked back up to the IV bag, settling down in one of the chairs instead of back on the makeshift pallet on the floor like he wants to.

He looks over to Hannibal while she reconnects the line. Hannibal’s breathing is slow and shallow, and his skin has a sheen of sweat and a faint grey cast despite the blood transfusions.

“What’s going on right now?” Will asks.

“What I understand is that the two of you killed a murderer together. That is the body I removed from the patio. The news says there is a wide search after Hannibal’s escape yesterday. You are reported as missing, and a ‘person of interest.’”

“Could be worse, I guess,” Will sighs.

“Hannibal expects you to recover from your injuries. He is less certain that he will.”

“Yeah, his… the chances he pulls through without surgery probably aren’t good, even if there wasn’t any actual shit in what we flushed out of him last night.” Will vaguely remembers a hoarse proclamation that Hannibal couldn’t smell fecal matter in the saline they’d used to irrigate the wound.

“What will you do, if Hannibal dies here?”

“I… don’t know, and don’t want to find out.”

“What will you do if he lives?”

Just keeping both of them alive has thus far consumed all of his attention. The idea of a future without Hannibal alive and in the world is… unbearably bleak. The idea of a future with Hannibal is still overwhelming.

“Can’t live with him, can’t live without him,” he quotes Bedelia with a sigh. “Guess I’ll have to figure out how to change one of those.”

“That would be unusually wise of you.”

Will remembers at the last moment to only let the left side of his mouth tug upward in bleak amusement. “What will _you_ do?”

For the first time since their initial meeting in Lithuania, Chiyoh looks truly, openly uncertain. “I don’t know. He is my family, though I have not been near him in a very long time. I will decide when I have to.”

How much of an opinion would Hannibal have on that, Will wonders. He supposes they’ll find out.

His stomach clenches, even as Hannibal stirs uneasily nearby. He _hopes_ they’ll find out.

“You should be free to have a life of your own,” he murmurs, his throat feeling raw.

“People mean so many different things when they say ‘free.’”

“They do, don’t they?” is all he can say in response.

* * *

 

An hour later, when Will’s just given up on convincing Chiyoh to take some time of her own to sleep, Hannibal wakes up with a noise that’s almost worse than the one he made when they were flushing his wound.

Will is on his feet so quickly he nearly passes out, and the stitches in his shoulder ache sharply at the motion he subjects them to. “Hey, stay still, you’re okay,” he murmurs when he can, and immediately feels like an idiot because it is rampantly obvious that Hannibal is anything but. He puts a hand in his hair, though, and gently strokes his temple with his thumb. “Stay still. Deep breaths, and then tell me what’s going on when you can.”

Hannibal’s eyelids flutter open and he visibly stops himself from moving to curl onto his side, every muscle tense. He does actually take a few deep breaths, though they sound anything but soothing, sharp as they are. “How long since the fight?”

“Nine hours? Ten, eleven at the outside.” Will answers, glancing up to Chiyoh for confirmation, who nods. “How are you feeling?”

Another stupid thing to say. Will doesn’t have to know anything about Hannibal to know that he’s in terrible pain, and the fact that he _does_ know Hannibal means the transparency of that agony is, in itself, terrifying.

Hannibal doesn’t answer, but his arm moves under the blanket to feel his own abdomen. Neither his face, nor his voice a moment later registers surprise. “Peritonitis. Probably a perforated small bowel. The antibiotics will have slowed the onset, but that’s a mess they can’t clean up alone,” he rasps.

And that’s what Will has been both afraid of and planning for, since he woke up. He doesn’t immediately recognize the term Hannibal uses in diagnosis, but he does know that “hole in your intestine” means “good luck fighting the infection unless the hole gets closed.” That’s not something either he or Chiyoh is remotely qualified to do. They have to get more competent medical help, and soon, or barring a miracle of chance, Hannibal is going to die.

“Hannibal, listen,” Will says, the words coming out rough. He doesn’t like what he’s about to attempt, but he likes the alternative much less. “I’m going to try to get you help. I have to go for a while. We might need you to be lucid when I get back. Let Chiyoh help you with the pain as much as possible, but stay here, okay?”

“Will.” It’s the warning tone, at once warm and cautionary, and yet terrifying in how much it is breathed rather than voiced, in this moment.

“Okay?” Will repeats. He doesn’t know that he can deal with whatever exhortation or question might lurk behind the use of his name, right now.

Hannibal relents. “Yes.”

Will lets his fingers tighten in his silvery hair, which is lank with fever sweat and lightly crusted with salt, and then he withdraws.

“Chiyoh, where did you get the supplies, before?”

* * *

 

The urgent care clinic Chiyoh had stolen from is crawling with cops. So is the nearest ER. Will has to abruptly revise his plans, first looking at other urgent care centers - all too far away, this far out in the country - and then, more desperately, veterinary clinics.

Most vets are necessarily generalists, right? How different, really, is sewing up a human’s innards, versus a dog or a cat’s?

It’s a blessing, he realizes, that vet clinics aren’t generally monitored like hospitals are. He can casually park the car in a lot nearby and wait, as the hours tick on, while he researches the staff on one of the burner phones he’d found stashed in the house. (It’s difficult to be patient, because over-the-counter medicines only barely take the edge off of the pain he’s in, but if he doesn’t get this right, Hannibal will likely die and Will could very easily end up in jail. The knowledge is a very effective incentive for endurance.)

There’s a Doctor Chandler and a Doctor Haddad, as the presiding veterinary physicians for the nearest office he finds. Both to-all-appearances-happily married, according to Facebook, which will probably make his life easier. He’s not going to actually hurt anyone’s family for Hannibal’s sake - that is definitely a bridge too far - but he’s not above insinuated threats as a tactic for gaining compliance.

Neither exits the clinic at closing time, and he’s not especially surprised; when there is only one car left in the clinic’s parking lot, he crosses over and breaks into the car as quickly and quietly as he can. There is no indication that he is noticed.

Half an hour later, Doctor Chandler emerges. ( _She’s as petite as her Facebook photos suggested. Good.)_ Will ducks down under the dark grey blanket in the back seat, mentally preparing for if she likes to toss her things into the back, rather than the front passenger side.

She doesn’t; she opens the driver’s door, instead. He hears the _thud_ of a bag in the vicinity of the passenger seat. He waits until she closes the door.

Then he audibly clicks off the safety of the gun that he immediately presses into the base of her skull from behind.

“Don’t move,” he says quietly, as she freezes. “Listen closely. If you cooperate, you’ll go back home to your husband and finish setting up the perfect nursery, go about your lives, none the worse for wear.”

Well, potentially in want of a therapist, but Will doesn’t have the energy to feel guilty about that.

“What- what do you want?!” she gasps. “Seriously I don’t know what you think you’re going to - “

“I need your services,” he says evenly.

“You have an animal you need vaccinated or something?” She manages to sound incredulous, despite her wide-eyed stare in the rearview mirror and the slight tremors that shake her torso in waves. Will wonders errantly if Hannibal would be able to smell the fear on her.

“I’m going to pass you handcuffs, and you’re going to put them on one wrist, and then put both hands behind your seat. Do you understand?”

She breathes for a moment before nodding, then affirming tersely, “Yes.”

“Okay, here they are. Onto one wrist, then behind the chair back. Just like that. Good.” She complies, and he’s almost suspicious, for a moment, how well this is going. But sometimes maybe plans do go as they’re meant to.

He can feel her want to fight back, in the bare instant it takes to lower the gun so he has both hands to get her right hand bound, too. But she does seem to know better, to understand that he can hurt her in a dozen ways he’s not actually willing to, and to be prudent in light of that flawed understanding.

It’s a more elaborate restraint system than he’d have preferred, but he needs to be able to credibly challenge her in a physical altercation at each stage, in case she decides to fight, and he’s definitely not at his best. First he secures her torso to the chair with duct tape. She makes a face that he ignores. Then he binds her ankles. Then he carefully releases her hands from the cuffs. “You’re going to put your hands in front of you where I can bind them comfortably, immediately. You won’t have much leverage to hit me, and if you do, I’ll ignore it; I’ve dealt with that before, and it’s better for us both if this is easy.” If she managed to catch him in his bad shoulder, she could do some real damage, but that wound dressing is hidden, and it wouldn’t _actually_ change the final outcome, most likely.

After another two minutes punctuated by hissed curses on her part as he carries out his promise, then cuts the tape on her torso and has her move, she is bound and as helpless as he could want, on the back seat floor of the car.

“You have a human surgical patient with an abdominal gunshot wound, perforated small intestine, probably no serious internal bleeding, although we can’t completely bank on that.” Will explains, tone even and matter-of-fact, despite the urgent churning in his own gut. “There’s a full surgical kit in terms of hand tools and sutures, along with disinfectants, antibiotics, opiates, saline, and I think another unit or two more of blood. We’ve got an IV line established. There may be some sedatives available, but I don’t know which, or how old they are. Tell me what I should get from your office, and where to find it.”

She’s looking a bit wild, but not especially cowed by the idea of operating on a human, and for that, Will feels a measure of relief. “Which antibiotics?” she demands curtly, apparently resolving to rise the occasion, as he’d fervently hoped.

He winces. “Didn’t catch the names, sorry. Whatever a friend managed to grab from an urgent care clinic.”

“Broad-spectrum, then, probably. The patient might need something tailored down the line if they’re unlucky, but no point in cleaning out my clinic; it’s going to be similar to what you have.” She pauses for a moment, obviously considering. “Do I get a ventilator?”

“Pretty sure not.”

She sighs. “Okay, that’s… might be really bad but probably not. We can do this with ketamine. I think. Get me - shit, I don’t know how human dosages work!”

“He does,” Will assures her, feeling a faint whisper of humor touch the words.

“ _Fine_. Then get me… fuck, I have no clue how much. All the ketamine in the locker. And the dexmedetomidine and atipamezole. And syringes, if you don’t have those just lying around. You’ll need a key from my purse, for the locker.” Ketamine, Will recognizes, of course - it’s popular as a street drug - and he silently mouths the syllables to the other two before nodding sharply.

He is in and out of the vet clinic in ten minutes, with the specified drugs. He takes the duct tape off Doctor Chandler’s mouth before he leaves the parking lot, but ties a blindfold made from a roll of gauze over her eyes - which she protests until he explains, “This lets me justify bringing you back here after you save him.” The car rumbles to life, and they go back toward the cliff house, as if yielding to a tidal pull.

“You looked familiar,” she notes after a few minutes of sullen silence as he drives. He spends a moment to glance back over his shoulder to make sure she’s still where he left her.

“The news has been… excitable, lately,” he allows.

“If you’re _kidnapping_ me to operate on someone for you - you can’t take him to a hospital, you’re -!” Will sighs. “Oh my god.”

“God’s probably not listening, in my experience,” he notes dryly, suddenly feeling not just worn out, in the colloquial sense, but well and truly threadbare. Or perhaps a bit like an old mug, chipped and grimy, as he had quipped to Hannibal several lifetimes ago.

“Never cared for the bastard, anyway. But- you’re-”

“Taking you to treat someone you may well recognize, and will almost certainly have opinions about, yes,” Will says simply. “You’re going to treat him, regardless.” His tone brooks no argument, and he receives none from his captive.

It hits him, abruptly, that he’s not going to be just a person of interest after this. He’ll be wanted for kidnapping, unless he decides to upgrade the crime to murder, after all, and that… he won’t. It should feel like more of a loss: this, right here, the fact that he has just kidnapped a woman who knows who he is, and whom he intends to release, means that he well and truly cannot return to Molly, no matter what.

A part of his mind almost resents that the realization isn’t a shock, is not a paring-down of options, after all. That from the moment he decided he didn’t want to live in a world without Hannibal, he had already given that up. She’s already paid too much for loving him. Bluebeard’s husband dares not take other lovers while the man himself lives, whatever else he may choose to do, wherever else he may go.

* * *

 

He leads Doctor Chandler into the basement of the cliff house, slowly, carefully, her blindfold still secured.

“Okay, here we are,” he murmurs as he pulls it off, still keeping hold of her bound hands for the moment. He can feel her eyes lock onto Hannibal even though he’s standing behind her, and he looks, as well.

Hannibal’s skin is ashen and his breathing seems labored, but his eyes are slitted open, staring the newcomer down with a bleakness that sends ice through Will’s veins.

“This is a veterinarian,” Will explains, not caring to name the woman to Hannibal, just in case… in case. “She can help you, but she’ll need your input on drug dosages.”

Hannibal stares at Will for a moment, and Will worries that he’s not completely lucid, but a moment later, he gives a slight nod.

Chiyoh speaks up from her chair, and Chandler jumps, clearly not having noticed her before. “I will be your assistant.”

The vet composes herself, clearing her throat. “And what are your skills?”

“For our purposes here, only steady hands, and the ability to follow instructions.”

“Alright.”

Will sets down the bag of supplies. “Here’s what I brought from your clinic. Get oriented for a few minutes; I’ll get you something to eat and drink. Would you like coffee?”

She looks taken aback at the offer, but Will just stares back at her blandly. He knows what fatigue and hunger can do to one’s judgement and attention, and he needs her at her best, or as close to it as possible. Conforming to her expectations of a kidnapping is not really on his radar. (It’d be funny, almost, if the stakes were any less dire.)

“Yes, please,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. “With a teaspoon of sugar, if you have it.”

He nods, and turns to fetch the provisions.

* * *

 

Will returns to quiet, jargon-laden discussion between Doctor Chandler and Hannibal, though Hannibal’s voice is rough and pauses a bit too much. Will can feel his effort to remain present, to impart the necessary information, like a physical weight on his own chest.

Chandler, for her part, is handling the situation as well as Will could have hoped - though it’s still obvious she isn’t happy about her circumstances, she is much calmer than she had been in the car, and seems to be applying herself to the situation with pragmatic diligence. Chiyoh is the placid stillness of a dark lake on a quiet day, ominous, yet for the moment, inquisitive, in waiting.

Will catches Hannibal’s eyes on him as he sets down the protein bar, bottle of water, and steaming mug of coffee, which Chandler seizes with alacrity. He treads over to the table as if pulled by gravity.

“Will she do?” he asks, as if he’s got any planned course of action for if she won’t.

“Yes,” Hannibal says, the word more breath than voice. “A good choice.” He takes a moment to swallow. “There is a safe. In the master bedroom. We will likely want its contents. Fifteen, two, twenty-eight, twelve.”

“Fifteen, two, twenty-eight, twelve,” Will repeats under his breath. “Okay. The drugs we brought - you’ll be fully under?” The thought of Hannibal being held in chemically-induced unconsciousness disturbs him, subtly, even though he knows that it’s necessary, that unconsciousness will be a blessing given his current state.

“Yes. There is a significant possibility that I may be agitated upon emergence from the anesthesia. It would be prudent to restrain me before that occurs.”

“Okay.” Will swallows. He feels like there should be more to say, that there _is_ more (there is so much more), but this isn’t the time or place and he’s just going to have to hope that Hannibal stays alive long enough to get to that time and place. “Don’t die on me,” is all he manages for the time being, which draws a huff from Hannibal, but no words, assurances or otherwise.

Their captive vet is watching him with uncomfortable acuity when he turns away, and he grits his teeth as he looks her in the eyes. “Do you need anything else?”

She shakes her head and takes another sip of her coffee. “Got the bases covered. This place is well-equipped.” She seems to bite down on another statement before pressing on. “We’ll induce in another few minutes and get started. You’ll need to either stay out of here or scrub up if you’re planning on being close during the procedure.”

He’d definitely rather stay out, but he offers, anyway. “Would I be helpful if I was here?”

“Probably not,” she replies. “Frankly, you look like shit. I assume you’re hiding more than whatever happened to your face, but I guess it’s probably not life-threatening. We can talk about it when I’m done with him.”

The idea of letting another person poke at his injuries is not a pleasant one, and his discomfort with letting her cut into Hannibal only redoubles with that thought, but intellectually he recognizes that she’s right and she’s actively trying to help. Compassion is a strange thing, sometimes. He nods warily, looking between the vet and Chiyoh. “I’ll be within earshot if you need me.”

* * *

 

The safe is both a way forward, and a monument to what might have been.

 _He made a place for us_.

There’s money, unsurprisingly, a few keys, a list of addresses… and also passports with fake identities. For Hannibal, for himself, and for Abigail. Not for the first time, Will is struck with how much intent had truly been shattered the night of his abortive betrayal - not just the one teacup, but a whole set of them, one moment sitting primly on a tray, waiting for company, the next in a thousand shards on the floor.

“I liked it here,” Abigail says from where she’s seated on the bed, quiet and reflective. “It was like a place out of time. Nobody watching, nobody judging. Just me, and the ocean, and Hannibal, sometimes.”

It’s been years since his mind last conjured up her ghost, but Will isn’t especially surprised to find that she’s here, now. “So safe, right until he wasn’t,” he murmurs, pondering what it must have been like, and half-remembering Abigail’s own words about her father.

She snorts at that, though. “Hannibal was never _safe_. I knew that even before I knew he’d killed a lot of people. But he always understood, and that was better than being safe. He always cared about what I thought, how I thought. How I felt.”

Will’s jaw clenches as he nods. That tracks, ridiculous as the idea should be. Hannibal always _cares_ , at least where some people are concerned; it’s just that care isn’t nearly the deterrent for him that it is for most. “You know, when I was in prison and he visited me, I think he genuinely meant it when he said he didn’t want me to be there. It felt like mockery at the time, because he _put me there_. But I didn’t quite see him, then.”

“You saw what he did to you, what he did to other people.”

“Yes.”

“You thought you saw what he’d done to me.”

Will swallows hard, remembering sitting in his cell and seeing her severed ear on his meal tray. “Did he ask you, first? Or did you just… fall asleep one day, and wake up missing an ear?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she reminds him with a dark little smirk. “Do you want to know badly enough to ask him?”

The persistent, deep ache in his shoulder spikes into a sharpness that seems to jump behind his eyes when he reaches up to rub at them. “I don’t know,” he sighs under a wave of weariness. He needs to change his dressings. He needs to make plans for relocating. All he wants to do is take some oxycodone and sleep until Hannibal is awake again. Or longer. “I really don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter very much brought to you by TiggyMalvern being awesome and helping me construct a plausible survival scenario for Hannibal. I had Will kidnap a vet originally in her honor and only later realized that that was probably the most reasonable way this played out.


	3. Chapter 3

Will has had time to do some research and return to haunt the basement, when after a little more than two hours, Dr. Chandler calls out, “We’re finishing up in here.”

Hope twists in Will’s chest - it’s sooner than he would have guessed, but then he doesn’t know much about the specifics of emergency medicine. She pokes her head out of their impromptu operating room to beckon him in a few minutes later. “I want to give the last dose of ketamine time to mostly wear off before waking him up, but that’ll be soon. Your friend has instructions for post-operative analgesia and wound care, though obviously I’ll help with that while I’m here.”

Hannibal is lying on the table under the blanket once more and looking… well, unconscious. But not in the troubled half-sleep of the morning, and his breathing looks steady.

“How was it?”

“Multiple perforations of the small intestine, as he’d already diagnosed. I sewed them up. Those sutures will dissolve on their own and be fine unless he over-exerts himself and tears something. No indication of issues with solid organs or the large bowel, which is frankly very lucky. It could have been a lot worse than it was.”

“No kidding,” Will sighs, feeling drained but grateful. “What are his odds, now?”

“I’m cautiously optimistic. Basically, all major clinical signs except the presentation of peritonitis itself were and have remained good - no indications of septic or hypovolemic shock; you two did well to get him on fluids and antibiotics and a blood transfusion as quickly as you did. He’s got a better chance of recovery than I was afraid of when you first gave me the situation. Complications like tearing stitches or the presence of drug-resistant bacteria could be an issue, though ironically since he hasn’t set foot in an actual healthcare facility since the injury, chances of a superbug infection are low. He’s probably going to have to be the final arbiter of timelines for when he should be doing what kind of exercise, which isn’t ideal, but he’s certainly qualified.”

“Thank you,” Will ekes out, even though he knows she’d never have been here if he hadn’t forced her.

“I’d say you’re welcome, but we’re in extraordinary circumstances,” she responds dryly. “Now, let’s have a look at you.”

“I don’t know that it’s necessary.” Changing his dressings an hour ago wasn’t fun, and he’s not in a hurry to endure the logistics of shirt removal-and-replacement so soon again.

“I don’t know that it isn’t, and I suggest you use the able-bodied medical professional while you’ve got her. It’s obvious you’re in more pain than what I assume is a facial laceration would account for.” She raises an eyebrow, expectant.

“She is a smart woman, Will; you should listen,” Chiyoh says, stripping out of her gloves and tossing them into a bin.

“Can you even go a day without subtly calling me a dumbass?” he asks her tiredly.

“Can you go a day without acting like one? You are not being careful with your arm.”

Dr. Chandler’s lips thin in a half-suppressed, appreciative smile, and Will acquiesces, though not especially gracefully.

“Yeah, alright,” he sighs as he begins to unbutton his shirt left-handed. Chiyoh isn’t wrong; lifting his right arm has been getting more and more unpleasant, but it’s not something that can just be _fixed,_ only tutted over and, he supposes, managed. “I got stabbed in the shoulder. And the face. He cleaned them and sewed them up, and I’ve had IV antibiotics.” And he’s covered in bruises, abrasions, and minor cuts from being thrown through the window, but who’s counting?

He sits down in the chair, and Dr. Chandler helps him get the shirt off, examining the dressing with a critical eye before carefully peeling off the medical tape. “These were changed recently?”

“While you were working on him.”

“Is whoever did the stabbing and shooting still loose somewhere?”

“No, he’s definitely not.” Will remembers one particular detail about the fight, and winces. “My old OSHA coordinator would be losing his shit about potential blood-borne pathogens right about now; I stabbed him with the same knife in between these two.”

Dr. Chandler also winces. “Ew.”

“Yeah, ew. I don’t suppose you know anything about human post-exposure prophylaxis?”

She shakes her head. “Plenty about rabies PeP, but not much in the way of specifics for the kinds of things you’re worried about. Just that, in general, the sooner the better if you think it likely you were exposed. Dr. Lecter will have more useful thoughts on that than I do.”

“Right, of course.” Will’s brain feels sluggish, especially as his immediate-term fear for Hannibal has finally begun to ebb. Every thought has to drag itself through the syrupy haze of pain and fatigue in turn, where normally they dart in and out from all directions, minnows scattering in a stream.

His captive is inspecting the stitches on the front of his shoulder with a frown. “This looks okay, about as inflamed as I’d expect, but your arm should really be immobilized.”

“I’ve kind of needed that arm.” Hannibal had said the same, but conceded the point readily enough given that when he’d been working on Will, they hadn’t even had Chiyoh.

“There’s a lot of ways it could go bad if you don’t take care of it well, ironically more than with his, in the long term. Not in a way that’ll kill you, but enough to be a problem.”

“This is the fourth time this particular shoulder has gotten metal stuck in it,” Will says, the ghost of his sense of humor infiltrating the words as he realizes this is almost a rehash of his conversation about it with Hannibal. In some ways, a doctor is a doctor is a doctor, different as they obviously might be otherwise. “I’m familiar.”

“It is your knife hand,” Chiyoh offers blandly, from the sidelines.

He gives her a flat look for dredging up the memory, but blaming her for protecting Hannibal would be unhelpful, as well as ludicrously hypocritical. (He does, he realizes, blame her for pushing him off the train, however.)

“Can you find me something to make a sling? And maybe Google a tutorial for tying it,” Dr. Chandler is asking Chiyoh, and after another few moments of inspection, she begins to re-dress his shoulder. “I’m not one for tabloid media, Mr. Graham.”

“But you made an exception for us?” Will raises a weary eyebrow.

“More like the tabloid perspective seems to have infiltrated the mainstream. A somewhat contradictory mixed-bag of information, speculation printed as fact.”

“Agreeing to work with Freddie Lounds will tend do that,” he mutters darkly. “Ask what you want to ask.” He can give her that much, he supposes, for saving Hannibal, and for being the kind of professional he’d have been happy to have taken his own pack to, in a simpler world.

“Is hunting down serial killers really what you do for the FBI?” There’s a certain quality to her hesitation that says this isn’t what she really wants to know, not quite, but Will thinks he’s got the gist. “I’ve seen you referred to as…”

“Jack Crawford’s bloodhound?” He rolls his eyes.

“More or less.”

“Every single one of them thinks they’re clever for that. I’ve always had a lot of dogs,” he adds in clarification. “My official position, once upon a time, was as a lecturer at Quantico. I consulted for the BSU - the division that specializes in serial murder - for about a year, then, and got sucked back in to find the Tooth Fairy recently.”

“He’s the one who did this to you. And he’s dead.” Her eyes flick up to his, questioning but steady.

“Yes.”

“How many serial killers have you killed?”

 _And here it is_.

“Three. All of whom were, at the time, trying to kill either me or someone else.”

“You had a gun when Hannibal put a knife in your belly,” Abigail notes casually, from Hannibal’s side. Will glances toward her briefly, finds her studying Hannibal’s still-insensate form with the detached sort of fondness he remembers from Palermo. “Could have probably still had it when you realized he was going to kill me.”

Will’s eyes close at the familiar wave of nausea that accompanies that thought. He’s thought it many times before, and it never gets any less upsetting. Once, imagining killing Hannibal had given him pleasure, a searing flare of righteous vindication. But the idea that he could have done so on that night, before Hannibal took Abigail away from him a second time, has always held only a sick sort of guilt. The tableau in his mind where instead it is Hannibal bleeding out on the floor beside him was never any kinder than the reality, and so Will had summoned a ghost, instead.

“But not the one over there,” Dr. Chandler points out, almost softly, bringing him back into the present.

Chiyoh’s voice is limned in acid as she interjects, returning with what looks like a bed sheet. “Not for want of trying.”

And suddenly he’s laughing, and it _hurts_ , it pulls at his stitches but he’s laughing anyway; Chiyoh almost certainly doesn’t even know about the times he came much, much closer to killing Hannibal than he did when he pulled out his knife in Florence. Yet here he is, his world presently narrowed to the need to keep him alive despite all the blood spilt between them, and the ghost that haunts Will, still. “Nope,” he gasps, and it’s exhausted agreement to both of the living women present.

“Easy,” Dr. Chandler is saying, wariness that had mostly dropped while addressing the concrete problem of damaged body parts seeping out from her once more. “Maybe don’t try it again. I get the sense you’d regret it.”

 

* * *

 

Hannibal wakes up a few minutes after Dr. Chandler administers one of the drugs they took from her clinic. He is sweating again, but the precaution of strapping him to the table proves an unnecessary one, as he is mostly calm after one swift flicker of his eyes around the room, taking stock, though Will senses a frisson of distress when he realizes he is restrained. It had been his suggestion, but his discomfort is vivid in the air anyway, and Will is moving to correct it before conscious thought comes into play, fumbling with the straps one-handed.

“Hey,” Will breathes as he loosens the bonds around Hannibal’s torso.

“Hello, Will.”

Dr. Chandler clears her throat. “The surgery went well. You were right about the nature of the damage.”

Hannibal’s expression, despite barely changing, is, to Will, telegraphing “ _Of course I was_ ,” practically in neon lights, and that’s somehow more comforting than any medical synopsis.

“How is your pain?” she asks, then continues in a mutter, “Nice to actually be able to ask a patient that, for once.”

“Unpleasant but tolerable at the moment. I would suggest starting the combination we discussed soon.”

Dr. Chandler nods to Chiyoh, who picks up a bag of clear fluid and moves to replace Hannibal’s IV. “It’s ready to go; say something if things get worse rather than better and we need to adjust.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“I’ll get you some ice,” Will murmurs, remembering that part well from one particular hospital stay. A quiet but fierce part of his brain wants to see Hannibal’s recent incision, wonders how much the scar from it will end up looking like his own. (Wants it like some clawing, covetous thing.)

The ice in the freezer isn’t fresh and no doubt won’t taste the best, especially to Hannibal, but making new, gourmand-friendly ice hasn’t exactly been at the top of Will’s recent priority list, and he expects that what’s there will be better than nothing. He smashes up a bag of it with a rolling pin before transferring it to a cup (a significant amount of the chips skitter off onto the countertop or the floor, and he can’t be bothered to try to clean them up), then filling another two bags as an afterthought; some of his bruises could have benefitted from a cold compress hours ago.

When he gets back down to the basement, Dr. Chandler is milling about under the pretense of tidying up the medical paraphernalia, though most of that was already done when Will came in earlier. Hannibal’s eyes are still slitted open, following her, though they move immediately to Will as he enters. He sets the ice down within Hannibal’s reach, then turns to their increasingly anxious captive.

“I’ve set up space for you to rest until we leave here, if you’ll come with me.” He’s made sure his gun is on him and visible - while she seems to have mostly settled into believing that he is in fact going to release her unharmed when possible, she has now not only seen how beaten up he is, but strapped his dominant arm to his chest, and Will would strongly prefer she didn’t get ideas about a premature escape.

Would Chiyoh help him if the woman decided it was worth trying to make a break for it? He doesn’t even know. There are clearly boundaries with regard to when and how she will and won’t interfere in a situation for Hannibal’s safety, but she contains a strange constellation of opacities, even to Will’s perception.

After showing Dr. Chandler to the basement’s closet-like bathroom, he restrains her at a pallet in an area of the wine cellar he’s cleared. While one of the bedrooms upstairs probably would have served the purpose, he doesn’t like the idea of leaving her in a completely different part of the house from himself, and the less she can infer about the house’s layout, probably the better. She eyes the restraints with obvious distaste, but the book pile he’s left for her with something at least bordering on amusement. It’s a representative selection from around the house, including _The Brothers Karamazov_ , an indiscriminately-chosen variety of medical texts and journals, a few volumes of poetry, a YA paranormal romance that seems to involve werewolves (which surely must have been Abigail’s), and a _Calvin & Hobbes_ anthology (of which the primary owner might well have been either Hannibal or Abigail, and he’s annoyed at how curious he is about that).

“Honestly, thanks,” she says dryly, nodding at the books. “Can I ask how long I’m stuck here?”

“I’m about to go try to get that nailed down, but I’m thinking ideally, we’ll leave tomorrow night and drop you off on our way out. I don’t want to try to get him upstairs and into a car immediately.” Will sees no point in withholding information about this. He wants her as reassured and comfortable as it’s possible to allow for, both for altruistic reasons and simply because if she decides to stop cooperating things will get more difficult.

She lets out a faint sigh. “Yeah, he should definitely not be trying to walk right now and I don’t know how you or we would carry him.” A pause, and a furrowed brow. “Did he walk _down_ here?”

Will has to smile, just a little, at that. He doubts she would particularly enjoy the full recounting of all the things Hannibal managed to do after getting shot by Dolarhyde, but he does say, “He’s a tough sonofabitch.”

“Mmn. I gathered.”

“I’m going to leave you alone till morning unless there’s an emergency,” he tells her. “But call out if you need something. Someone will be nearby.”

She probably won’t, he knows. But he does mean it.

 

* * *

 

“If either of you has any more convenient hideaways in the US, now would be the time to mention it. I think we’re best off waiting a while to leave the country, but we can’t stay here, either.” Will glances between Hannibal and Chiyoh, the former looking at least marginally more comfortable, the latter finally showing her fatigue.

“Where are you keeping our guest?” Hannibal asks.

“Wine cellar. She won’t hear us unless we start yelling.”

“For her sake, I hope you adjusted the thermostat.”

“I did.” Will has to smirk at that - Hannibal would likely just as soon kill her, were it up to him, rather than release her with news that they are both alive and at large. But in the meantime, she is a _guest_ whose comfort is to be considered, even if she is also a captive. Then the memory of Hannibal blowing on a spoonful of herbal broth before feeding it to him flutters behind his eyes, and the smirk fades. “So.”

“I have an apartment in Richmond,” Chiyoh notes, voice dubious. “But it is not a hideaway. I wouldn’t recommend going there.”

Yeah, no. City apartments mean security cameras and neighbors. And a city apartment anywhere in Virginia or Maryland and probably the surrounding states, besides, means neighbors who have been seeing their faces plastered all over the news.

Hannibal tilts his head in what Will reads as curiosity regarding this piece of Chiyoh’s life - Will supposes he almost certainly can’t know much about how she’s been living the last three years. “This was my last property in the United States that was unknown to the authorities. I suggest we secure a rental somewhere secluded, if Chiyoh would be kind enough to pick up the keys.”

“Is there a credit card that’s safe to use for that?” Will asks. “We can find somewhere that’ll take cash if we have to, but that’s harder these days than it used to be, and it looks suspicious.”

Chiyoh nods. “I have an account here that is not connected to the estate. You may use it.”

“Okay.” Will takes a deep breath. This actually seems to have a chance of working. “We hole up, we wait, and then the safest way to leave the US is going to be one of the road crossings into Canada. Or a boat, maybe, but Jack knows that’s how I went to Europe last time.”

“I agree that Uncle Jack may expect a maritime exit from you. Canada will make for a serviceable waypoint.”

Chiyoh nods once more, sharply, before fishing a slim wallet out of her coat (long-since abandoned by the door of the room) and handing Will a card from it. She points at the tablet she’d used to find the tutorial for his sling. “Make arrangements. I am going to sleep in a bed.”

“Thanks. Good idea.” She leaves the room, and he looks back to Hannibal. Aside from a pillow tucked under his head and neck, he’s still flat on the operating table. “That can’t be remotely comfortable.”

“While I have endured less pleasant positions for extended periods of time before, it is not. If you don’t mind, I believe there is a foam wedge in the master bedroom closet.”

There is, indeed, a foam wedge in the master bedroom closet, and Will manhandles it down to the basement to carefully help Hannibal prop himself up. The thing is fully twice as wide as the table, so it looks a bit ridiculous, but duct tape keeps it in place well enough despite the pained face Hannibal makes when Will uses that on the pristine metal.

“Thank you, Will.” He eyes the rolled-up bedding in the corner, the comforter Will had woken up on that morning. “Are you planning to stay here?”

“Would you rather I didn’t?” Seeking out a bed, or even a couch on the ground floor, would put him more or less out of earshot, which he doesn’t like the idea of even if Hannibal might theoretically be on the mend. But if Hannibal wants to be alone, he supposes he could just as easily park himself in the hall.

Being alone should by all rights appeal to _him_ , he realizes; he needs to think, and some types of thinking are done much better outside Hannibal’s presence. But this house is full of ghosts of what was, and what might have been, and he has no desire for their exclusive company. And the roiling anxiety about Hannibal, himself, is quieter here and now, at least.

“No,” Hannibal says simply.

Will nods, that settled, and sits down to work out their next move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The YA werewolf romance in the book pile is totally _Blood and Chocolate_ , which I didn't realize had been adapted into a movie (which was apparently terrible) until I got into this fandom and started seeing occasional Hugh Dancy photo/gifsets from it. (I remember liking the book, but I also read it about twenty years ago, so I have no idea how good it actually was.) Aaaand it only occurred to me while writing this chapter that Chilton's little "I think I'll use that as a book title" was probably an intentional reference to it. xD


	4. Chapter 4

Sleep is a fitful, fleeting thing. Will dozes in short stretches, and every time he sinks beneath the waves of his subconscious, he finds himself sinking beneath much more literal waves, again and again searching for Hannibal in the roiling, cold dark of the Atlantic.

Sometimes he finds him, limp and unresponsive and impossible to haul out of the water. Sometimes he’s just gone, and once, Jack is somehow there to personally pull Will from the ocean, while Will struggles to keep searching. Once, with a surreal sense of peace, Will finds both himself and Hannibal on the ocean floor, still holding one another, their hair drifting lazily like kelp as they kneel in something more akin to suspended animation than to death.

When he finally wakes up enough to stay that way, he is still so tired that despite the discomfort of his makeshift pallet on the floor, he doesn’t move for a long time, groggy inertia outweighing all other bodily imperatives. He vaguely remembers finding a suitable cabin for rent before going to sleep, and booking it. They have a next step, as long as Hannibal doesn’t take a turn for the worse during the day. Somehow, Will’s going to have to rouse himself enough to get them there, though, and that seems almost daunting enough to crush him back into sleep under its weight. Almost, but not quite.

Eventually, he becomes aware of a louder, abnormal breathing pattern from Hannibal nearby, which finally brings him to sit up in alarm, wincing as his shoulder registers its protest. “Hannibal?” he asks, and finds that the man’s dark eyes have already settled upon him, drawn by the movement. “Are you having trouble?”

The muscles in Hannibal’s face shift ever so slightly, enough to convey a faint dry cast to his otherwise still-exhausted expression. “No more than is to be expected. Breathing exercises are recommended after abdominal or thoracic surgery to reduce the risk of postoperative pneumonia, though having been spared intubation, it’s not of major concern.”

“Oh. Right.” Will vaguely remembers that part of recovery, come to think of it. And that it really wasn’t fun. “Did you sleep?”

“Some.”

Hannibal’s ‘some’ might be a few hours, or a few minutes, for all Will knows, but he supposes that’s not a crucial detail. “How’s the pain?”

“Responding as well as I might have hoped to what we have on hand. Moving about will be… difficult, but I should begin to do so, soon.”

“D’you want me to get you… a robe, or something?” If he wore them at home in Baltimore, Will expects he has at least one here.

“I’d appreciate it.”

While the basement has remained on the cool side of comfortable, the main floor is chilly and damp with early morning mist, thanks to the demolished picture window. Will finds himself shivering almost immediately, though he’s normally very resilient to cold. He’s fretting about what the humidity will do to the piano, and the books, and the furniture, and most everything in the house before he stops to think about how unlikely it is that the place will remain undiscovered by the FBI and shakes his head at himself. But waste, particularly of the preventable sort, has never sat well with him.

The sky is a pale, almost gentle grey that seems to intrinsically match the salt smell of the ocean, and the sound of it pounding relentlessly at the rock of the bluff.

 _Soon all this will be lost to the sea_.

Did whoever decided to build this house in the first place think about its impermanence, or only the beauty of the view? Hannibal would have been keenly aware of that impermanence from the beginning, Will is certain. Probably tracked the progression of the bluff’s erosion meticulously as time went on.

He hadn’t fought it, when Will had pulled them over the edge, though he could have. Even after three years on a prison diet, Hannibal outweighs him significantly, and there had barely been any strength left in Will’s shoulder. Yet he had fought the ocean once they were in it, and had swum back to land, and life, with Will.

The soft chime of a clock rouses Will from his reverie, pulling his thoughts out of the ocean again, and he realizes he has no internal sense of how long he’s been standing in front of the broken window. _That_ comes with a nasty little shock; ever since his largely-unknowing battle with encephalitis, even the mildest sensation of lost time produces a spark of panic, the sudden and urgent need to take stock of his circumstances and assess what might have happened since his lapse in attention.

In this case, the assessment is quick and simple: it’s still early morning and he is not in an unexpected location. He’s cold enough to be distinctly uncomfortable, but it’s likely only been a few minutes. Still, he has to fight to slow his breathing and remind himself that he knows where he is, _who_ he is, and that he has a plan. A plan that involves him taking care of fugitive who’s just had emergency surgery, and a captive, and himself (the latter of which he’s especially still not the best at).

 _Chiyoh is here. She’s been helping. She’ll keep doing it_.

While that was an exceptionally welcome fact two nights ago, it mostly fails to be comforting now that he’s semi-functional and Hannibal isn’t in immediate, mortal peril. She radiates disapproval when she’s around Will, and he selfishly - and ridiculously, given how much he deserves it for so many reasons - wishes he didn’t have to deal with it. (Meanwhile, the nice, normal woman, who has almost certainly not killed anyone with either a wine bottle or a sniper rifle, and whom he kidnapped to operate on a serial killer distinctly _doesn’t_ , and how’s that for irony?)

The nice, normal woman he kidnapped would probably like some breakfast. And he should probably (definitely) eat something. And make coffee. _Lots_ of coffee.

The electric kettle has been filled and turned on before he realizes with a jolt that he’d originally been headed upstairs to find a robe for Hannibal. He scrubs at his face to stave off another wave of pointless panic, which aggravates his stitches and _goddamnit_ he hates having to remember to baby injuries, but at least the sharp uptick in pain yanks his mind more firmly back into his body.

 _Robe, coffee, food._ _If you’re going to lose your shit, at least let it be over something serious_.

Intellectually he knows, he really does, that he only loses his shit over minor things when there’s something serious in play, but that’s another fact too distant from his present reality to be particularly helpful. What is somewhat comforting, finally, is settling on the knowledge that he can shield himself from the task of determining the future in the longer-term with this simple list of mechanical tasks, now - that at least seems to unstick his joints enough to get him moving upstairs while the water heats.

When he’s in the master bedroom, a mental image from his emptying the safe the night before rises into active recall and prompts him to exactly the right place in the closet, but he takes a moment to run his fingers over several other things hanging there anyway, letting the varied, but always luxurious textures of Hannibal’s wardrobe ground him in a more pleasant manner than poking at his injuries. It smells good ( _smells like Hannibal_ ) in the closet, and it’s dim and quiet and cocoon-like. Will takes a deep breath before making himself step back out of it, as if it might let him take a bit of that feeling with him.

 

* * *

 

For all it had briefly seemed daunting, the matter of coffee and breakfast (for those who haven’t just had major abdominal surgery) is handled inside of twenty minutes despite the fact that Will is still working one-handed. Oatmeal doesn’t require much in the way of dexterity to prepare, even when it’s some fancy brand and decidedly not-instant. He leaves some in the pot for Chiyoh, who has yet to stir from whatever bedroom she’s claimed, and brings a bowl down for Dr. Chandler.

And then the whole day is stretched before him as he sits, back in the room with Hannibal, gingerly eating with the left side of his face to as much an extent as he can manage. It will be long, boring, and dully painful, unless a new medical emergency or an FBI incursion interrupts it, so Will hopes for boring.

Hannibal had fallen back asleep almost as soon as he had the robe around him as if the effort of doing so exhausted him, and Will briefly considers an attempt at doing the same, but the combination of physical discomfort and strong coffee make that idea a non-starter. He could, he supposes, go find his own stack of books to read, but his mind is too restless and buzzing for that to be palatable, either.

What eventually drives him from the bowels of the basement again, however, is the smell. Not that the smell is especially strong, but the longer he just sits there, awake and aching, the more the mix of hospital-like scents of steel and disinfectant and blood with leftover sea water starts to get to him, makes the air feel stifling even though it’s cool.

With effort, he pushes himself to his feet and trudges back to the ground floor, where a little of the early-morning chill has burned off, but only a very begrudging little. When that isn’t enough, he struggles into shoes and a half-shrugged on jacket and picks his way through the scattered glass of the window to the outside.

He doesn’t linger on the patio, with its faint remaining bloodstains (and his memory of more, so much more, blood and moonlight and beauty), but goes around the house, aimless except to get farther from the cliff. The early spring chill of the ocean breeze feels good to him now, out in the open rather than where it has been invading the interior of the house, as if he has a fever to cool, though he thankfully does not. The sun is still playing coy amongst a grey veil of clouds.

There’s a copse of pine trees just a little down the drive that he gravitates toward, breathing in the familiar scent as he slips into their cool shadow.

It abruptly reminds him of Maine, and a house he’ll never be returning to.

It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should.

Though the kidnapping had felt like a point of no return at the time, the part of him that had chosen to manipulate Jack and Alana into providing an opportunity for a reckoning among killers had already said his goodbyes. The gentle comfort of his life with Molly and Walter had been a dream suspended in a soap bubble, popped on the jagged edges of the man who could coldly use Frederick Chilton as bait, could sit in Bedelia’s living room and taunt her with her fears, could provide Dolarhyde with information about the convoy without sparing a thought for the lives of everyone else in it. The man who had wrapped Hannibal Lecter in a bloody embrace and nearly died from the awe of what they’d just done together.

Molly deserved better than the danger he put her in, by going back to Hannibal. Deserves better than the man who’s crawled back out of the dark, where the monsters are born.

She _also_ deserves better than for her husband to run off with a murderer without a word, but at least this will be the last way in which Will wrongs her. Will leans against one of the trees and closes his eyes, fighting the hot well of shame.

He opens them again at the sound of Abigail’s voice. “You know the body count’s going to be lower if you stay with him, right? Think of it as harm reduction. That’s what all the literature on drug addiction’s saying works best these days.” She sounds amused. He really doesn’t want to be, but he snorts anyway.

“Hannibal is very much like a drug,” he agrees, bone dry. “The body count was supposed to be _over_ , though.” Over with their two as the last.

“Yeah, well, it’s not, and you’re not really sorry about that, are you?”

“I should be,” he sighs. “But no, I’m not.”

“Then stop trying to be.”

“It’s not that simple, and you know it.”

“Well, maybe it should be.” She raises her eyebrows in affected nonchalance, and then fingers a pine branch, laden with needles and dew that hasn’t yet managed to burn itself off. “You should take some of this back in there. If the smell was bothering you, it’s got to be bothering Hannibal too.”

Will doesn’t know that that’s necessarily true, but it might well be, and Hannibal would absolutely not deign to complain about it if it was, so he breaks off a small branch - the scent of fresh sap is bright and alive on the air, even to him - and carries it back to the house.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal is awake when Will returns, the lines of his face full of tension that makes Will briefly afraid that some new thing is wrong, but when it subsides almost immediately at the sight of him, he recognizes it as anxiety. That twists uncomfortably in his stomach, something like power and something like remorse.

“I needed some air.” He clears his throat and lifts the pine branch, feeling faintly silly. “Thought I’d try to bring some of it back for you.”

“Thank you.” Hannibal’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he accepts it, breathing deep for a moment and looking so fond that Will finds his own eyes skittering away. “An olive branch would be traditional, but this smells rather nicer, I think.”

“We’ve never been anywhere near traditional; no reason to start now,” Will points out dryly. Hannibal _plays with_ traditions often, collects them like knick-knacks from all over the world to be polished and displayed, but that’s hardly the same thing.

“Likely not. Is Chiyoh still asleep?”

“Best I can tell, yes. Haven’t seen or heard her up yet, anyway.” Will eyes his bedding, then settles a bit stiffly in the chair, instead. “It’s only nine-thirty or so; I figure about noon I’ll bring our guest back in here to….” He realizes abruptly that Hannibal is perfectly capable of ‘checking up on’ himself, but it still seems like that should be a thing.

“Discuss my current condition and expectations for moving forward, yes, that would be prudent,” Hannibal finishes for him. “I would not turn down the opportunity for another informed opinion, particularly since she saw the damage she repaired firsthand and I did not.”

“Right, that, good.” Will is not at his most articulate right now, it seems. But he’s glad Hannibal isn’t being snobby about the medical details.

“What are your plans for her, afterward?” Hannibal asks.

“We’re leaving her and her car at the vet clinic I took her from, at night, after closing. We’ll leave her tied to a chair inside, which gives us the rest of the night before the FBI knows we’re alive. By then we’ll be at, or off the interstate and close to the cabin I booked us, near Lake Michigan.”

Hannibal watches him for a long moment. “You’ll be wanted for kidnapping, no longer with the opportunity to spin a story for Uncle Jack if we are apprehended.”

“I know. I accepted that when I did it.” He swallows, having anticipated objection. “I’m not going to kill her.”

“Nor would I prefer that you did,” Hannibal replies smoothly. “She has demonstrated admirable flexibility and grace under pressure. A credit to her profession. I only wanted to ensure that you know what you are ‘signing up for,’ so to speak.”

He feels his lips twist ruefully. “That’s new for you.”

“New territory inspires new approaches. Tell me, Will, is this an olive branch in truth?” Hannibal holds up the pine bough. “While I appreciated the poetry of what you tried to do recently, a repeat attempt would be tiresome.”

It’s almost a relief, that Hannibal’s bringing that up directly. Will has known it needed to be talked about beyond his very abstract conversation with Chiyoh or the franker one with his Abigail ghost. _Poetry_. He supposes that word is applicable. “Especially given what I’ve done to keep us” - _you_ , he means - “alive, since then?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the saying - ‘Heaven doesn’t want us, and Hell’s afraid we’ll take over’?”

“I think it obvious that we are far more favored than that.”

Will can’t help smiling a little, and it hurts, as it should. “Made in God’s image, beautifully destructive. Who am I to deny God?”

“You certainly have a great deal of practice in denying yourself.” Hannibal’s tone is notably lacking in reproach, rather adopting its familiar curious attitude that it takes when Will presents an interesting curve ball.

Will is so tired. Some part of him still thrills to the idea of intriguing Hannibal, and sometimes he wants to utterly annihilate that part for effectively being what got him into this whole mess, and sometimes it feels like the only part that makes life worthwhile. “That’s true. I’m thinking… it might be time to practice something else.”

“Will.” He looks, without really meaning to, and gets lost in the dark depths of complicated affection in Hannibal’s eyes.

“I’m here.”

“You are here. I’m grateful.”

Will… can’t be grateful for much, now. Not as raw as he is. But some part of him can treacherously revel in their freedom to speak to one another. No one is listening. No one can judge. “I’m here,” he says again, quietly, and it’s both an acknowledgment and a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took so long - it gave me a lot of trouble and required a lot of re-writing, but I'm delighted to finally have it up and be able to move on.
> 
> I endlessly appreciate all your feedback!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the second one Tiggy's had to reverse-Britpick me on, and I find that medium-key hilarious. I apparently have rather more British slang integrated into my lexicon than I was actively aware of! (I am an American who has been to the UK exactly once.)

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Chandler asks, tugging on a fresh pair of gloves. Hannibal is, after somewhat painstaking effort, sitting upright on the table, robe off his shoulders and draped around his waist.

“Much in want of a shower, but alas, that must wait. Otherwise, as well as to be expected, under the circumstances.”

Will can sympathize on the matter of a shower. When they finally get to the cabin, that will be one of the first things he does. It should be long enough since his stitches, by then.

“Good. We should try to get some food in you sooner rather than later, if you think you can manage it.” Dr. Chandler looks to Will. “More oatmeal, maybe?”

“There’s plenty; I’ll make a fresh pot. Our options, by the way, are pretty much that, and protein bars, if you want to put in an order for lunch and dinner. Oh, and wine.” He huffs a wry almost-laugh; the wine of course exists in abundance and she’s already seen it. (And honestly, wine sounds kind of wonderful to him at the moment, but he shouldn’t be drinking right now any more than Hannibal should, and he knows it.)

Will had been half expecting the freezer to still be full of not-so-mystery meat from years ago, but that had in fact been where he found the coffee, the oatmeal, and very little else. He supposes Chiyoh probably cleaned it out at some point, or maybe Hannibal even did it himself before absconding to Italy with Bedelia.

“There should still be a few particularly nice bottles of Bordeaux cabernet, if you’re interested,” Hannibal notes, some of the familiar twinkle sneaking into his gaze as he watches Dr. Chandler removing his bandages to change them. “They’ve had ample time to age.”

“I’ll pass, but thank you,” she says dryly, as if being offered fancy wine by a serial killer is just something that happens every other week. “Protein bars and coffee are fine by me.”

Hannibal looks toward Will, wistful. “I had been looking forward to the bottle we opened the other night. The Dragon’s timing was unfortunate in that regard.”

“I wish I could say I enjoyed the two sips I had, but I was a little preoccupied.”

“Yes, you were.” Will feels the whole weight of Hannibal’s gaze and his consideration for a few seconds, remembering the heaviness between them in those ephemeral moments. Then, Dr. Chandler’s speaking up and being practical again, either immune to the aura of emotional history that hangs in the room, or more likely, Will assumes, choosing to politely ignore it.

“This looks good. I think it’s time to start moving around - it’s not going to be fun, but I assume you know the line between ‘not fun’ and ‘tearing stitches.’”

“Indeed,” Hannibal replies.

“Okay, let’s give it a short go before lunch? Mr. Graham, if you’ll take his right side?”

And of course Will does, offering an uninjured arm to lean on as Hannibal slides off the table and walks, very slowly and uncomfortably, through a full circuit of the basement. It’s quietly, subtly shocking how difficult it is: even though Will witnessed Hannibal nearly incoherent with pain the day before, he’s thus far been enough like himself today that the illusion of untouchability had returned enough to be shattered anew.

“A chair would be better than the table, for future excursions, I think,” Hannibal notes, as they return to the makeshift operating room. “Easier to get down and up.”

“Okay, yeah. Try the food slowly, and if you can’t keep it down we probably need to revisit how we’re medicating you, but if you can, then have as much as you feel like, and get up and move around a bit every couple of hours until it’s time to leave.”

Having just sat down with obvious relief, Hannibal gives her a brisk nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

When Will shows her back to the wine cellar to wait out the remainder of the afternoon, she gives him a studied, conflicted look that makes him pause and raise an eyebrow before making his way out.

“He’s so…” she says, then seems to be at a loss for words, only following up with “...so,” a moment later, and he huffs a laugh through his nose.

“Yes. He’s very _so_.”

* * *

 

Will’s upstairs packing for himself (from a stash of clothing Hannibal directed him to that actually fits, because _of course_ ) while Chiyoh packs for Hannibal, when he hears the helicopter.

It gets close enough for a bit that Will holds his breath - and his gun - but it doesn’t land, though that’s hardly reassuring. While one occasionally hears and sees helicopters for more innocuous reasons than an FBI manhunt, right now Will doesn’t like their odds, and the remaining bloodstains on the patio combined with a huge broken window are better than a neon sign to any aircraft that gets the right view angle.

“Chiyoh!” he calls, tamping down on his panic and stuffing one more shirt in the duffle before he pokes his head into the hall. Assuming the worst, they still have a window, albeit probably a slim one. “Change of plans, we need to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

She emerges from the master bedroom with a large suitcase and gives him a grave look. “The helicopter?”

“Yeah. Let’s get this stuff in the car, and then I need your help with the vet. And then Hannibal.”

“What do you intend to do with her?” she asks, voice wary.

“Put her back where I got her. But there’s a lot of duct tape involved between here and there and you’ve got two good hands.” He’d considered, very briefly, leaving Dr. Chandler here, but they have to switch the cars anyway, and he’d still rather have an overnight time buffer before Jack gets positive confirmation that he and Hannibal are alive. (And if he’s being overly paranoid about the implications of the helicopter, that would be bad for her in a way he’s not willing to risk.)

She’s palpably spooked a few minutes later by the deviation from Will’s original timeline, and the clipped urgency with which he unhooks her handcuffs and instead directs Chiyoh to bind her forearms together with the tape, hands to elbows, but he doesn’t have the time or energy to feel too bad about it. She balks just outside the wine cellar. “You didn’t want me to see the house, before.”

“Right now I care about you moving quickly a lot more than I do you seeing the house. The plan’s still to have you back at your clinic tonight, but we can’t stay here in the meantime.”

He sees the moment where she thinks about struggling, maybe delaying them, and weighs that against what it might cost her. She isn’t nearly as afraid of him as she was early last night, but he stares her down, and it’s a very brief moment. “Okay.”

In short order they have her on the floor of the back seat of her car, legs taped together as well, and are going back for Hannibal.

He’s disconnected his IV bag from the cannula already, and is looking absolutely unreasonably unruffled, considering that all he’s wearing is a bathrobe and that his hair is quite literally very ruffled. “I take it it’s time to go.”

Will grimaces and nods. “There was a helicopter fly-by. This is sooner than I wanted you on the stairs, but…”

“Needs must.”

Chiyoh helps Hannibal into a wool overcoat from the foyer closet and then follows him up the stairs. It’s slow, and from the looks of it nearly as painful as coming down had been, but Hannibal makes it to the top, then into a half-reclining position in the back seat of the car, and declares himself not significantly the worse for wear.

The drive down the long, winding lane before it connects to the main road feels interminable even though Will takes it inadvisably fast. At every moment, he’s expecting to see police cars, or FBI-issue SUVs turning onto it and heading for him, and that’ll be it - he doesn’t hold any illusions about how likely he is to win an offroad car chase.

But they make it onto that road, and then the next one, and he starts to consider unclenching his jaw. They’ve got a few hours yet before the vet clinic closes, and he intends to wait rather longer than that to approach it, this time - it isn’t in a busy area, but it’s hardly isolated, either. Somewhere relatively safe to park in the meantime is a necessity to avoid having to take the enormous risk of stopping at a gas station, and he’s been heading toward a large, outdoor sports center he’s hoping won’t be in heavy use for maybe two hours when Hannibal speaks up, voice soft with amusement and pleasure.

“Your instincts were good, Will.” He’s had Chiyoh’s phone for a while now, going through the news.

“They usually are,” he replies dryly, stomach churning at what that probably means. “Dare I ask?”

“Freddie Lounds has had a busy afternoon, it seems, following the FBI. She’s posted a picture of the house from a bit down the drive, law enforcement swarming all over it. It’s titled ‘Cannibal Love Nest,’ exclamation point. Rather hasty photography, though, not up to her usual crime scene standards.”

In a way, some distant part of Will’s mind supposes, them finding the house is a good thing in the short term: it’s a hell of a crime scene to unpack, and that’s where their main efforts to find them will now be focused, for a while.

But mostly, the knowledge of just how close they had in fact come to actually being caught has his heart skipping beats in his chest, and his blood roaring in his ears. And here Hannibal is all but _laughing_ about it.

Later, Will will remember that this should not, does not surprise him: he _knows_ Hannibal, has witnessed him figuratively if not quite literally laughing in the face of unpleasant fate after unpleasant fate ( _except the ones Will was instrumental in_ ). Today they’ve slipped the hook and eaten the bait, and Hannibal can only be delighted by it.

Now is not later, though. Now, Will’s running on twenty-five percent caffeine and seventy-five percent anxious adrenaline, and he’s sick with it. Sick _of_ it.

“I’m glad you and Freddie are enjoying yourselves so much,” he spits, trying to regulate his breathing, but it’s no good. He’s already light-headed and that’s not doing anything for the panic spiral but egg it on, and he mutters a steady stream of profanity as he pulls the car over onto the shoulder. Hannibal and Chiyoh have both said his name, but he doesn’t know how to respond, so he doesn’t, just hastily puts the car in park and stumbles out the door.

For a moment he thinks he might puke, but the chilly air is bracing in a way he grasps at, and a sudden sense of relief at just _not being in the car_ leaves a belated realization at how claustrophobic he had been feeling in it. (It isn’t a tiny car, and he isn’t unaccustomed to crowding in a vehicle. But just then it had seemed to be trapping him, all the same.)

He lets the mental white noise come and drown his brain, dull his senses for a long moment, leaning against a tree just off the road’s shoulder.

As it recedes, he processes: They definitely just narrowly escaped capture. He is uncomplicatedly relieved about this fact, which in turn is its own relief, in another way - it says more about his own internal commitment to his current course of action than any conversation with an imaginary Abigail could.

“Will.” Chiyoh’s voice is near, she’s approaching.

He has to be okay, now. For now. “Yeah.”

“There are other cars; we should keep moving.”

“Yeah,” he sighs, again, resigning himself to turning around and trudging back to the car, willingly sealing himself inside again. He can feel her watching him, and mostly doesn’t care.

“I will drive,” she says.

Will lets out a long breath. Relinquishing that kind of control feels like something he shouldn’t do… but he’s also aware of how his present state is affecting him. How it dulls some senses, and sharpens others past bearing. “Okay, thanks,” he sighs, sliding into the passenger’s seat. He doesn’t mean to glance at Hannibal as he gets in, but his attention hasn’t lost its habit of awareness of him, and he quickly looks away from the naked concern on Hannibal’s face.

He swallows down the instinct to apologize, unwilling to invite any discussion of his freak-out in front of an audience. The firm squeeze he feels on his uninjured shoulder a moment later somehow both amplifies the guilt and assuages it.

* * *

 

The afternoon is still cool, fortunately for all of them, but the sun rallies against the clouds enough to drape the world in a hazy brightness like a damp, unwelcome blanket as they wait out the day in a very large, nearly-empty parking lot on the ass end of a soccer field. Dr. Chandler has been returned the use of her hands for the time being, both to check bandages on occasion and to read, which Hannibal also spends much of the time doing, but Will can’t focus on anything but wary (and increasingly weary) vigilance. It’s something of a comfort that the same seems to be true of Chiyoh, but rather less so that she also seems much more at ease with it than he is.

She is, he muses eventually, definitely a hunter, while Will has always been better suited to fishing, even when the prey walks on two legs.

When full night has fallen and Will is officially ready to vibrate out of his skin with his desire to leave, they finally set out for the vet clinic, which triggers a whole new set of anxieties that Will has mostly managed to keep a lid on thus far. What if Chiyoh’s car has been towed? ( _They can take this one, or steal another, but either will cause difficulties down the line.)_ What if, despite the late hour, someone sees them going in or out of the clinic and calls the cops? ( _Likely that Chiyoh’s car gets compromised; same problem but on a more urgent timeframe._ ) What if, _somehow_ , someone’s managed to connect Dr. Chandler’s disappearance with them? ( _That’s the kind of jump Will makes, not the kind Jack does, especially since most local police departments aren’t going to get too riled up over an adult missing for barely over a day, with their car and leaving no signs of struggle, though the fact that substantial amounts of controlled substances were also removed from the clinic might draw just enough attention. If the cops_ are _staking out the clinic…_ _best stop thinking about that, because then they’re just fucked. But they won’t be. They won’t be._ )

“When we get there,” Will says, as much to calm himself down as to ensure efficient action at the necessary time, “we get her inside quickly; the waiting room’s got chairs that will work well with the tape. Make sure the blinds are closed on the windows. Then I’ll go get the other car and bring it nearby so Hannibal doesn’t have to walk much.”

Chiyoh glances over her shoulder. “I am grateful to you, for Hannibal’s life,” she says to Dr. Chandler. “But that gratitude will not make me sympathetic if you try to endanger him as we leave you.”

 _Thank you, Chiyoh_.

He had been trying to figure out how to word a threat along those particular lines in such a way as not to risk Chiyoh refuting any presumptions on his part, but now he doesn’t have to.

“I’m not rethinking my decision to cooperate; don’t worry.”

“Good,” Chiyoh says simply. Will keeps driving.

Actually reaching the clinic an hour later is as anticlimactic as he could have hoped - it’s dark and quiet and he’s able to verify that Chiyoh’s car is where he left it on the approach. He parks the car in the far corner of the clinic’s lot, takes a deep breath, and turns it off. Still no activity nearby.

“Alright. This is it,” he says quietly. “Hannibal, could you drape my coat over her shoulders before she gets out?” They’ve re-taped Dr. Chandler’s arms, and just in case a car drives by at the wrong time, or something, he wants the fact that she’s a prisoner not to be visible at a fairly casual glance.

“Of course.” Hannibal takes the coat that Will passes him. “Thank you for your excellent work. I wish you and your family well,” he says to Dr. Chandler, with that disarming, utter sincerity that is uniquely his own. Dr. Chandler doesn’t have to come up with a verbal response to that, given that her mouth is now also taped, but after a moment of looking nonplussed, she manages a reasonably dignified nod before awkwardly scooting her way out of the car.

As before, Chiyoh does most of the duct tape wrangling once they’re in the clinic waiting room and ensuring that their captive won’t be going anywhere until the place opens tomorrow morning, while Will keeps watch by the front window. When she’s almost done, he glances at Dr. Chandler, who by this point seems to have mostly checked out of the proceedings, deflated with relief that they’ve followed through on his promise to leave her where she will be found, unharmed. He senses that gratitude from him would be flatly unwelcome at this juncture, so he doesn’t offer it. Instead, he says only, “Friendly word of advice: whoever you talk to about this, avoid Freddie Lounds. I can almost guarantee she’ll approach you at some point; she’s been stalking Hannibal and me since before Hannibal got caught. She’s a petite redhead with corkscrew curls, might not use her own name. Whatever you say to her, you won’t like what she does with it.”

He swallows. He could leave other messages with her, that would probably reach their intended recipients. Could even take a couple of minutes to write a note.

But no. There’s nothing he wants to say to Jack that’s worth the time to write it. No sincere apology he can make to Alana, who will have gone into hiding. ( _He’s not sorry_.) Nothing he can think of to say to Molly that would remotely soften the news she’s going to get.

He leaves Dr. Chandler’s handbag with her keys inside it on the front counter, briefly inclines his head to her, and slips out to start the journey north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so Dr. Chandler makes her exit from this story, relatively unscathed. (She will likely find herself seeking a therapist at some point. Of the non-murderous variety, thanks very much.) Thanks for all the positive feedback on her; I'm glad people have found her enjoyable and wanted things to go well for her! 
> 
> I kinda want to write her talking to Jack Crawford, so that might happen as a one-shot at some point. But for now, your (ir)regularly-scheduled Grown Men Learning How To Handle Their Feelings Without Murder (of each other, anyway) programming shall continue as fast as I can write it. :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They keep following the plan, but the plan has its limits. Improvisation will be required.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even more thanks than usual to [TiggyMalvern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiggymalvern) for beta help on this one; sometimes I know something's not right and she invariably tells me what it is.
> 
> CW: body horror in the final scene here. It's a dream sequence and completely of a piece with canon imagery, but probably deserves a notice for anyone who needs a warning about this kind of thing!

When they cross the state line into Pennsylvania, Will mostly stops worrying about them being caught on the road, and then the drive is long and boring - it’s an improvement, he thinks. At least the three of them have an easy, unspoken consensus in favor of doing it mostly in silence. Boring though it may be, Will finds that preferable to conversation, just now.

Hannibal reads or sleeps by turns; Chiyoh and Will trade off driving and attempting to nap through the night. Twelve-hour, nonstop road trips are really not an ideal activity for people in their forties and fifties, even when two out of three of those people _haven’t_ very recently had multiple new holes punched in their bodies. They make a stop at a 24-hour Walmart not quite an hour away from their destination for Chiyoh to stock them with groceries (Will smirks a little at the idea of Hannibal deigning to touch anything that comes from there, then remembers that he’s been eating BSHCI food for the last three years, and the smirk goes away), and finally arrive at just about the time Will imagines Dr. Chandler will have been found.

He won’t be checking the news today, that’s for damn sure.

The rental is _almost_ as idyllic as the pictures made it seem, and more isolated, which means Will’s tentatively happy with his choice. He still has Chiyoh help him do a cautious sweep for security cameras before Hannibal goes in, but when they don’t find anything, he starts to unclench. The prospect of being able to get _clean_ and stop _thinking_ again for a while is beyond tantalizing, so close at hand.

There are two bedrooms - a downstairs master and another upstairs. It seems like the kind of thing that should want some discussion, but doesn’t at all, really: stairs are obviously difficult for Hannibal, the bed downstairs is a king, and he and Will have already established that their preference for maintaining proximity is mutual, so neither of them will be sleeping on the couch in the den. Will hadn’t explicitly thought through that logic when looking at rental listings, but it had been there nonetheless. Both his suitcase and Hannibal’s find their way into the downstairs bedroom.

“We all should eat. I will make breakfast,” Chiyoh says into the quiet of _what next_ , slicing through the white noise that had been starting to build back up in Will’s skull.

He nods. “Thank you.” Looks to Hannibal. “Let’s get your bandages changed.”

“That would be prudent. And a change of clothing, preferably. I should be able to get into sleepwear without mishap.”

The thread of frustration Will hears in his voice and sees on his face as they retreat to the bedroom is well-contained, but neither particularly subtle nor mysterious. To have to be so careful, and to require help with the basic tasks of living would be anathema to Hannibal, and now that he’s mostly in merely tolerable amounts of pain, the frustration has made its way to the forefront of his affect.

“Have you ever even _been_ a surgical patient before now?” Will wonders aloud as he carefully peels away medical tape from the shaved skin of Hannibal’s abdomen. (The sharp visual juxtaposition with the still-very-present hair on his chest is… odd. It probably annoys Hannibal’s sense of aesthetics.)

Hannibal’s tiny, answering smirk when Will glances up is almost self-deprecating. “Once. I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed when I was in my late twenties. A highly unpleasant experience, though in most respects preferable to this one.”

“Not a fan of the milkshake diet?” He can hardly picture Hannibal drinking a milkshake, even a fancy one.

“No, indeed.” Hannibal’s voice is dry and amused. “I subsisted mainly on pureed soups. Lost my taste for them for quite a few years afterward.”

“But at least you could get around easily enough to make them yourself.” Obvious culinary fixation notwithstanding, Hannibal has endured substandard food far more than he has bodily frailty. Will himself chafes any time an injury forces him to change how he moves - and indeed, is presently chafing over the need to baby both his shoulder and his cheek - and it isn’t remotely surprising that Hannibal shares that tendency with him. “‘In most respects’?” he prods, curious at the implied _not all_.

“Despite our semi-improvised anesthesia rather deviating from the human surgical standard of care, I found the experience less disorienting overall. More like a somewhat colorful and confused nap, less like lost time.” There’s a faint, ironic twist to this comparison, because of course Hannibal would be recalling how distressing lost-time incidents had been to Will, years ago.

Will smiles humorlessly. “Yes, I can appreciate that difference.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Finished re-bandaging the incision and the smaller, but rather messier exit wound, Will moves around to do the same for the entry wound in Hannibal’s back. His jaw clenches like it does every time he sees the Verger brand there, and he has to force his eyes away from it to focus on his task.

Hannibal’s voice pulls his mind more or less back to the present a moment later, warm and subtly rough. “There’s also the matter of the company. In the previous case I had none, and didn’t want any. Now, I couldn’t ask for better.”

There’s half a joke Will could make about how that can’t possibly be true with respect to who’s playing nurse, but he won’t. He knows without having to be corrected that any lack of technical proficiency on his part is inconsequential in the face of other factors. That Hannibal finds enduring the physical ministrations of a stranger as distasteful as he does. (Did he let Bedelia patch him up after his fight with Jack in Florence? Would it have been less or more unpleasant than receiving care from an unknown? Will isn’t going to ask.)

“This is definitely better than my last hospital stay in that respect,” Will admits in a sigh, with only a little of remembered bitterness flavoring the words.

The worst part of his weeks in the hospital after Hannibal had put him there - worse than the physical pain, worse than the indignity, worse even than the raging media circus he’d woken up in the middle of, or the intermittent awareness of Abigail’s death - had been how much he’d _missed_ the bastard.

* * *

The shower in the en suite master bath is spacious, and far more luxuriously-appointed than anything Will’s ever sought out for himself, but the only way that significantly factors into the experience of the thing for Will is that it takes him two increasingly irritable minutes to figure out how the damned faucet works. When there’s finally a stream of hot water for him to stand under, letting it wash over his scalp and down his face (the wound in his cheek is _searing_ and he doesn’t even care), that’s all that matters - it’s pretty much the best shower Will has ever taken. He nearly falls asleep on his feet from how soothing it is, and he makes himself turn off the water far sooner than he otherwise might have so as to prevent that continuing to be a risk.

The morning light in the kitchen is that offensively cheery, butter yellow that always seems to come on the mornings when one is planning to go back to bed with great prejudice. Will hopes the curtains in the bedroom are thick.

Chiyoh’s idea of breakfast is bowls of rice, each topped with a raw egg and a splash of soy sauce. The cabin doesn’t have chopsticks, which Will assumes would be more appropriate utensils, but it seems to be just as readily eaten with a fork or spoon, despite the face that Chiyoh makes at the prospect of doing so. Will gives her an apologetic look after a couple of bites and moves to microwave his. Just a few seconds, but long enough to cook the snotty, almost-raw egg texture into something he’s more comfortable with.

“How long are we to remain at this cabin, Will?” Hannibal asks casually, midway through his rice.

“I booked it for a month. We can maybe extend that, or change to another rental in the area, if it’s still looking iffy to cross the border by then.”

“I will arrange to get you credit cards. And another car,” Chiyoh says.

Hannibal nods. “An excellent thought, thank you. We make a rather distinctive trio for traveling.”

Will swallows salty, half-cooked egg and sighs. “I’m sorry we compromised your cover,” he notes quietly. “You saved our asses.” No matter how little fondness is between them, he owes her gratitude for that. Loyalty like hers is too easy to take for granted, and he’d meant it when he said she ought to be free.

She gives him a level look. “I made my own choices. And Crawford already knew my face, but nothing else. He will know nothing new, now. I’m in no danger, unless I am caught with you.”

“And we will ensure that you are not,” Hannibal adds smoothly. His optimism seems to be returning in full force.

The rest of breakfast, they take in silence, which is surreal in a way the quiet car ride wasn’t - eating with Hannibal has historically always been a combination of a social event and a theatrical performance, even the day he’d shown up at Will’s hotel room in Minnesota. But Hannibal is in pain and probably only a little less tired than Will is, and with Chiyoh, loyalty clearly doesn’t translate into an interest in conversing. Will decides he’s glad they can just be efficient about getting their bodies fed, for once. When their bowls are in the dishwasher, Chiyoh disappears upstairs, and Will and Hannibal return to the downstairs bedroom, both ready to spend as much of the day unconscious as possible.

The curtains, as it turns out, aren’t the blackouts Will would prefer, but at least the window is north-facing, and with the curtains drawn the room is tolerably dim. There’s a brief moment of strangeness, now that they’re actually here, at the prospect of casually climbing into bed with Hannibal - an air of domesticity that hearkens back to helping Hannibal in the kitchen years ago, but more profound and less charged.

It feels so good it _aches_ , or maybe that’s just his shoulder.

They don’t say anything else, just slide into the bed with varying degrees of stiffness and respect for mending skin and muscle, and then Will will barely remember the few moments of wakefulness he retains after that.

* * *

Will dreams of falling apart at the seams.

He’s sitting sitting across from Hannibal, like they used to do every week in his office, except they’re in the chapel in Palermo, and the chairs are the cheap vinyl ones from the vet office waiting room. And they’re just having a conversation - probably about church collapses or something else equally grandiose and morbid, and then suddenly Will’s cheek is splitting open, the laceration wider and wider, until it’s hard to shape his words. While he’s struggling with that - _what was he even trying to say, he’s lost his train of thought and he shouldn’t do that around Hannibal -_ oh, there are his stitches gaping in his abdomen, pulling themselves loose while a bit of intestine threatens to poke its way out.

And then when he abandons the attempt to keep speaking in favor of holding his belly together, the joints of his right hand and arm start to just… fray. Flesh falling away, down to bare tendons and ligaments and bone. It’s as if he’s a marionette crumpling one appendage at a time, while his insides are actively attempting to become his outsides.

Hannibal is watching him closely, patiently waiting for whatever he’d been trying to say. Eventually he seems to take pity on Will and reach out to pick up his mostly-limp right hand and move the finger joints, one by one. “Everything seems to be functioning normally, Will.”

Except it only moves under Hannibal’s direction. The tendons are disintegrating almost as rapidly as the skin did, leaving Will’s muscles unable to pull on the bones, no matter how hard he strains to.

“I can’t move it myself,” he ekes out, somehow, despite the fact that the slash in his cheek is so wide that the flesh on the lower half has just flopped down against his jaw, now. He can feel it tearing farther up his face, toward his ear, every time he moves his jaw. He tries to straighten a finger of his own accord again, and it hangs, still and useless, from the half-flayed meat of his palm.

“Your body is perfectly healthy, Will.” _But it’s not, it’s not, it’s anything but; he’s literally falling apart_. “It is your mind with which you must strike an accord.” There’s that dispassionate surety, that whiff of not-at-all-earnest concern, again, and Will _hates_ it.

“Please don’t lie to me,” he whispers, then repeats more urgently, more vehemently, “ _Don’t_ lie to me, Doctor Lecter.”

“Will,” Hannibal begins, but he doesn’t even want to hear it. There’s a new gap in his flesh at the shoulder, pulling wider, and this one actually, actively _hurts_ , where the others didn’t, really, like someone’s yanking at a seam he hadn’t remembered was there.

“ _Will_.”

His right shoulder is legitimately on fire, not in the distant way of pain in dreams, and his name in Hannibal’s voice is taking on a depth that doesn’t belong here, either. A note of real concern that he can’t possibly mistake for that façade of yesteryear.

There’s a hand on his left arm, where he isn’t falling apart yet, and it’s warm and gentle and firm. He’s awake. He can move his fingers again, all of them.

He squeezes his eyes more tightly shut before opening them to the dim shadows of a foreign bedroom. It takes him a moment to piece together what’s actually going on.

He’s in an unfamiliar, though comfortable, bed. There’s an alarm clock on the nightstand, sun trying to seep in past the curtains. He’s next to Hannibal. He’s on the run with Hannibal. _I’m in who-the-hell-knows-where, Michigan, it’s twelve twenty-two in the afternoon, and my name is Will Graham_.

“Fuck,” he says, the word more exhale than voice.

“You appeared to be having a nightmare,” Hannibal says. Will can feel his eyes on him, but he’s not in a hurry to meet them. “I thought it best to wake you when you started clawing at your shoulder.”

“Yeah,” he manages. “Thanks. Hurts.”

“I would imagine. You’ve been careless with it more of the time than not.”

“Needed my hand.”

“Yes, I know. But now you need to recover. Let me check your stitches and help you back into a sling, so you don’t inadvertently undo my good work while sleeping, hmm?”

Now Will does turn his head to look at him, and his expression is just so…. It’s not actually all that physically different from the one Hannibal wore in his dream. Yet the earnest desire to help, to soothe, that it carries can’t help but sink into Will. This is the truth: Hannibal loves him. That means Hannibal only wants Will to hurt when he hurts him, be broken when he breaks him, and neither is on the official agenda at the moment.

“You just want to see me tied up,” he hears himself say. Some other version of him is appalled, but not this version, so it’s okay.

“I want to see many things, Will, but you permanently impaired in the usage of your dominant arm is not one of them. Temporary restriction, however, will be beneficial in this case.” There’s a frisson of amusement in Hannibal’s voice. Will likes it.

“Okay, then, I guess.”

“You’ll need to get out of bed.”

“Right, okay.” He swallows. Frowns. “What about you?”

“I need to visit the restroom in any case. May as well combine the effort.” Hannibal stands up, carefully and in stages, when Will makes his way around the bed. He finds the discarded sling-wrap and remakes it, settling Will’s right arm firmly against his chest once more.

“You like doing this for me,” Will murmurs, mind floating in a choppy sea of remembered anxiety and instinctive comfort. He’s less inclined than usual to question his own impulses before he speaks.

“I don’t like that it’s necessary,” Hannibal corrects. His voice is like velvet or sandpaper; Will can never decide which. “But I like that you trust me to take care of you, when I can.”

And hell if there isn’t a lot of baggage behind _that_ statement. Will has _let_ Hannibal do a lot of things, over their history together, that mostly (except for the very earliest violations) didn’t involve _trust_ so much as fatalism, but it all seems to come out the same in the wash, now. He’s never shied away from Hannibal’s touch, not once, even when he’s been aware that that touch was likely to lead to his own death.

Hannibal definitely also likes Will resting his forehead against his shoulder as he finishes tying off the sling. It feels like a surrender, though nothing momentous actually happens. It is an admission, that he still trusts Hannibal, or at least accepts what their mutual proximity might inspire. He lifts his left arm, a bit like he had on the cliff, and makes it an intentional embrace, hand threading between Hannibal’s arm and his side and resting at a diagonal up to his shoulder, carefully avoiding the bandages he’d replaced earlier.

He can hear Hannibal breathing him in, and finds himself smirking. (His face still hurts, dully.) “What do I smell like?”

A warm huff of breath stirs his hair. “Artificial citrus, from what I must assume are the bathing products provided with the rental. Traces of the cleanser you used on your injuries after your shower. The inside of the closet where your clothes were kept. Blood, and your sweat, though I’m glad to say it’s of the relatively healthy variety.”

Will’s own sense of smell is, as best he can tell, on the somewhat acute side of average, and that’s difficult enough to filter at times. “I don’t think I envy your nose.”

“Most gifts of perception are bladed on both ends. In this case I’ve always found the depth of experiences and information to be worth the intrusion.”

Will can, at least intellectually, appreciate that. More acute senses render every moment more unique, allow one to experience nuances most others would miss. He wonders what it would be like, to be able to chase after those differences, rather than mostly wanting to insulate himself from them.

He lets his fingers curl into Hannibal’s shoulder for a moment, then lifts his head.

A part of his mind informs him, almost as an afterthought, that this would be an appropriate time to kiss him - if it weren’t for the full-thickness stab wound in his cheek, and the fact that they’re both muzzy with painkillers and, in Will’s case at least, sleep.

The fact that he’s thinking about appropriate times to kiss Hannibal should probably be disturbing, but it isn’t. It’s not anything he hasn’t thought about before, years ago, except then he’d been mistrustful that the desire was truly his own. He’s under no such evasive misapprehensions now.

The moment breaks, and Will pulls away. “I’m going to lie back down. Thank you.”

“Of course, Will,” Hannibal murmurs, and lets him go, before making his own way to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, they’re both back in bed and awake, Will staring at the ceiling and wondering if he can coax his mind back toward sleep, Hannibal browsing on his tablet. “What did you dream of?” he asks eventually. Will can feel the moment his eyes land back on him.

“Falling apart,” he says simply, before elaborating. “Standard body horror stuff. Old scars opening back up again. Flesh eroding around my joints until it was only the connective tissue was left, and I couldn’t move.” He swallows. He’s hesitant to tell Hannibal the rest, but it also feels like it could be a segue into a conversation worth having. “You were there, telling me it was all in my head.”

“Did you believe me?”

“No.”

Hannibal considers this, no change in his expression. “Yet when you awoke you demonstrated nothing but trust. A curious, if welcome distinction.”

“I know who you are, Hannibal. I know we’re past that, past you having reasons to do that.”

“Quite right.” Hannibal shifts, and there’s a click in his throat and an instinct that makes Will turn to meet his eyes. “You know yourself far better, too. And I know that whatever destruction may yet occur between us, it won’t be you turning me in to the FBI.”

“It won’t,” Will agrees readily, feeling that truth settle between them. Acknowledging it openly when they’re not in the middle of an active emergency feels… good. Necessary. Part of Will knowing himself better - because he definitely does - is him knowing that his decision making in a crisis or an otherwise urgent situation looks very little like his decision process in calmer scenarios. But in this one, the two are in accord.

There’s another long moment before Hannibal speaks again. “I have sometimes wondered what might have happened, had I in those early days been willing to trust you as you trusted me. What would have been possible if I had not chosen the conservative course of action.”

“Which was framing me, to keep me from exposing you.”

“Yes.” Hannibal’s voice holds no regret on that, and Will understands it. Hannibal had regretted the lack of his presence, but not his own actions that created that state of affairs. The alternative, to his mind, had been killing Will, and he hadn’t wanted to do that.

“Well, if everything that can happen, has happened, then somewhere there’s a you and me who became partners in crime without any of the betrayals. Maybe we ran off with Abigail.” The possibility of such an outcome is an old wound. It still aches when he prods at it, but no longer does it provoke any of his righteous fury toward Hannibal. “And probably somewhere there’s a you that’s in prison a lot sooner and a lot more finally.”

“And what of the current you and me, Will? How desirable is the present situation?”

“Well, the stab wounds aren’t my favorite, and you getting shot in the gut isn’t, either,” he replies dryly, and Hannibal lets out a huff that’s almost a laugh.

“Nor mine.”

“But beyond that… it’s really up to us, still, isn’t it? We’re in a liminal space. A lot of things could still go well, or they could go poorly.”

Will had looked at the possible timelines available when they’d dragged themselves out of the ocean. He hadn’t found the ones without Hannibal in them tolerable; still doesn’t. But where they are now holds no guarantees.

Hannibal nods slightly, and Will gets a faint whiff of appreciation from him. “The future will be dependent on understanding and compromise.”

“We’re obviously proficient at the first one. I’m curious what the second might look like, between us.”

“As long as you’re curious,” Hannibal says warmly, and there doesn’t seem to be anything much to say to that, now. Will finds his way back to sleep in a warm, vaguely itchy haze of gratitude.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took me so long - between my [Marlana ficlet for the ETRBB holiday exchange](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22274764), my draft for the upcoming Bang, a rogue story arc for later chapters, and various RL stuff, I've been a bit scattered lately!

After two days of just being grateful for the opportunity to sleep as much as he wants (or rather, as much as he can, which is not the same thing, but it’ll do), Will finds himself sliding irritably into the increasingly-itchy-and-boring phase of healing. It could be much worse: this time he’s not stuck in a hospital room, besieged by journalists, or Kade Purnell, or Frederick Chilton. He isn’t wondering who’s alive and who’s dead.

Isn’t wondering where Hannibal is and what he’s doing, because Hannibal is right here in the cabin, healing with him.

Once or twice, Will does wake from the whispering, sloshing darkness of sleep and finds himself thinking that perhaps he’s conjured another ghost. That the whole scene of the cabin - well off the main road, just as he prefers to be, and near woods and a great blue lake - is too idyllic to be real, let alone with both of them surviving to come there together. But the stiffness and obvious discomfort in the way that Hannibal moves when he rolls over to look at Will - that’s too _real_ not to be. The crinkling at the corners of Hannibal’s eyes when he looks at Will is familiar; the slight haze of pain and opiates in those dark eyes is not, nor is it something Will would have conjured.

The quiet “What are you thinking, Will?” definitely is.

“You’re real,” he murmurs in answer, not quite inclined to be ornery, but neither is he feeling especially loquacious.

Hannibal, of course, immediately prods at the implication, head tilting softly in inquiry. “Has that been a matter of concern?”

“I was noticing that it hasn’t been. If you weren’t actually here, that might be different.”

“Your mind is capable of vivid deception, even of itself. Perhaps especially of itself.”

“I think in my case there’s not a hard line between true self-deception and… consenting to the acceptance of an alternate reality,” Will notes dryly.

“Choosing to accept a counterfactual belief because it benefits your psyche in some manner.”

“Yes.” He swallows. “Does your memory palace ever… insert pieces of itself into your present reality?”

“Do I hallucinate, you mean? No. It would be much more accurate to say that I occasionally choose to carry elements of my present reality into my memory palace with me, so we may converse in more pleasant surroundings, or I may go into the past alone to visit those who reside there.”

“Abigail still visits me, sometimes. These days we both know she’s not real.”

There’s a slight quirk to Hannibal’s lips, and the glint of a puzzle piece slotting into place in his eyes. “And does she advocate for forgiveness, or for vengeance?”

“Nothing half so simple as either.”

It’s closer to forgiveness, Will knows, but that’s not something he’s willing to share with Hannibal. Hannibal almost certainly doesn’t have any need (or indeed, even active desire) to think that Abigail might have forgiven him, had she been able, but Will knows he would take some pleasure in the idea that at least in Will’s mind, she accepts what he did in a matter-of-fact manner. And Hannibal doesn’t deserve that bit of satisfaction any more than Will has the right to give it to him.

Will is vaguely surprised and more than vaguely relieved to find that this line of thinking is starting to lose its sharp edges. That he no longer feels obligated to _do_ anything about her death, or anyone else’s, at Hannibal’s hands. ( _Anyone else’s in the past, anyway_.)

“She calls me out on my bullshit, mostly.”

“An appropriate role for a teenager, or so I hear.”

“Yeah.” _It would have been_ , he doesn’t say. There’s no point. He doesn’t want to talk about this anymore.

“I’d be twenty-two by now,” she points out from beside the window, because apparently some part of Will’s brain is feeling ornery, after all. He doesn’t reply, but he does turn his head to look at her, and she smirks at him before going back to gazing out the gap in the curtains.

Hannibal, of course, is watching him when he turns back. Glances demonstratively toward the window himself. Will squeezes his eyes shut and rubs at them.

“Am I correct in the inference that your Abigail has elected to weigh in on our conversation now?”

“Pointed out that she wouldn’t still be a teenager,” Will grits out. “Can we not… We’re not. I’m not going to pretend to be having a conversation with both of you.”

“I’m not interested in conversing with your imago of Abigail, Will, but I am perhaps interested in what its interjection reflects about the state of your mind.”

“Sometimes she’s actually- Sometimes it’s actually helpful to try to talk things out like that.”

“And sometimes it’s merely painful observations about what might have been.”

Will sighs, but he can’t exactly contradict that. “Yes.”

“Your compassion for those you perceive as innocents has defined large parts of your life, but it is also very important to practice compassion toward one’s self.”

“Sounds like something a therapist should have talked to me about.” Will raises a sardonic eyebrow.

Hannibal lets out a quiet chuckle. “Possibly. Would you have listened?”

“Probably not.”

“How often have you directed compassion toward yourself, Will?”

And Will is about to say something glib, before he accidentally puts a moment’s actual thought into the question, and then suddenly he’s laughing, too loud and too harsh. He can’t quite bring himself to actually say it, because it just sounds so… so. But Hannibal gives him a knowing look, because of course he understands that the answer is _never_.

“New rule,” he says when the laughter subsides, leaving him almost exhausted enough to sleep again, though he knows he won’t. “No psychoanalysis within half an hour of waking up.”

 

* * *

 

When Will notices Hannibal smirking at his tablet at the breakfast table and catches a glimpse of Tattlecrime formatting, he knows he probably shouldn’t ask. He’s been avoiding the news for a reason (well, multiple reasons). But as they’re not presently driving away from a house where they have just narrowly avoided capture, he figures he can probably handle whatever is amusing Hannibal without a panic attack, at least.

“Freddie being especially entertaining today?” he asks, and Hannibal looks up, smiling more.

“With her palpable frustration that ‘Dr. Noelle Chandler could not be reached for comment,’ for the most part. I thought it significantly likely that she’d end up angling for another book.”

Will actually does take some satisfaction in hearing this. Frustrated is how he prefers Freddie Lounds, when he has to think about her at all. “Sounds like Dr. Chandler took my advice to stay away from her.”

“As much as I might have also enjoyed Ms. Lounds’s hyperbolic accounting of events, it’s likely for the best. Our Dr. Chandler didn’t seem the sort to seek the spotlight, and indeed, she hasn’t given any public interviews, it seems.”

Will sighs. “What are the mainstream news outlets saying?”

Hannibal doesn’t express any surprise that Will hasn’t been paying attention. “There is a maintenance of polite ambiguity where you are concerned. The articles simply state that a local veterinarian reports having been kidnapped ‘to perform life-saving surgery on serial killer Hannibal Lecter.’ You are officially wanted for questioning.”

“Officially,” Will echoes with a snort. “Jack must have really clamped down on whatever else she told him.”

“I’d imagine so. Heavily-publicized indiscretions of yours would further reflect negatively on him.”

“They would, wouldn’t they?” He rakes his good hand through his hair. “I don’t know if I pity or envy her, talking to him. She seemed to have the wiring to find it amusing, maybe, even though I’m sure it wasn’t fun, objectively.”

“I think she would find him exasperating. She is very practical, and he is almost tragically not.”

That draws a wry laugh from Will. “Yeah, no shit.”

There is a measured silence. “You haven’t been reading the news at all, have you?”

“No.”

“Would you prefer that I not bring it up?”

Will finds himself smirking faintly. This whiff of solicitousness… isn’t even new, really. It reminds him of Hannibal before he really knew who Hannibal was, yet somehow not in a bitter way. “I’d prefer to know what’s worth hearing. Just don’t especially want to read it. I’d seen enough lurid headlines to last a lifetime even _before_ I met you.”

“Yes, I’d imagine so,” Hannibal says, a smile in his voice. “Have you always disliked seeing your own press so much?”

“Have you always liked it so much?” Will counters, slipping back into old form with amusement.

“No,” Hannibal replies with a shrug. “Once, I found it infuriating.”

“What changed? I’m sure you were reading Tattlecrime well before you met me.”

Hannibal is silent for long enough to concern Will, but when he looks, there is only benign contemplation on his face. “A transmutation of frustration into curiosity,” he offers eventually. “I came to terms with how my work would be regarded by the masses, and lowered my expectations. Accepted that the details would inevitably be misunderstood, and instead began to look for novel perspectives and brief flashes of understanding.” Another, almost pregnant silence. “And then I met you.”

Will closes his eyes with the force of a memory that rises unbidden, but it seems he’s past feeling bad about how _good_ it felt and still feels. Hannibal in the doorway of his lecture hall, listening to his conclusions about the Copycat Killer. He’d felt the warm weight of Hannibal’s approval then, but misplaced its provenance. “And then I met you,” he echoes softly, and feels more than sees Hannibal smile again.

It takes him another moment to remember he owes Hannibal an answer. “I’ve always hated it. Since the very first time I was interviewed and I read the resulting article. All context out the window, my words twisted to fit the narrative the reporter was interested in. Not even maliciously - just, it missed the mark. Missed the _point_ , entirely.” Hannibal wants to be understood, but lacking that, is willing to accept the amusement at failing failures of understanding. Will also wants to be understood - _and Hannibal does, oh, he does_ \- but would rather be overlooked by anyone who can’t.

“I’ll keep you apprised of the highlights, then, and you can devote your time to things that please you more.”

Will pours them both more coffee, and means it when he says, simply, “Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

Will wakes up in the grey predawn hours, the early light barely seeping into the bedroom, bringing no color with it yet, only hazy visual awareness of what and where the room’s contents are. Hannibal is deeply asleep beside him, and doesn’t stir when Will slips out of bed and heads for the den. It doesn’t occur to him to put on more clothes than the ones he slept in.

There’s a moment of reflexive embarrassment when he sees the back of a feminine head of hair seated at the couch, facing the window and apparently waiting for the sun to come up; he’d expected to be the only one up for an hour or two yet.

Then he realizes that the hair is sandy brown, not black, and the woman waiting serenely ahead of him is too short to be Chiyoh.

Will licks his lips with a tongue that feels like it’s coated in sawdust, and moves to sit down next to her. “You shouldn’t be here,” he whispers.

When she turns her face toward him, her eyes are broken shards of mirror.

“Neither should you, but here we are.”

“You don’t understand,” he says more urgently. “You _can’t_ be here.”

Molly ignores him. “What did it feel like, to do this to me?” she asks instead, reaching up to tap at one mirrored surface. Her finger leaves a tiny smear of blood on the sharp edge, even though the greyish color of her skin suggests that no blood actually still flows beneath it. “What did you look like?”

“I looked like him,” Will hears himself say.

“Him?” she asks, nodding over her shoulder at Hannibal, who has appeared silently in the archway. He’s wearing his prison jumpsuit and looking at Will like he did the day Will thought he might be leaving him for good.

Will’s eyes stay glued on Hannibal when he answers. “The Dragon.” He should be putting himself in between them, should be forcing Molly to leave, maybe if he’s quick enough Hannibal won’t -

But the danger that should be in the room, was in the room a moment before Hannibal appeared has somehow dissipated, leaving in its stead only a hollow void.

“Good morning,” Hannibal says with a courteous nod to Molly. “Will you be staying for breakfast?”

She shakes her head wryly. “Think I’ve gone a little off by now.”

Then Will is waking up again, with a gasp and the scent of old blood in his nose. For a moment, he isn’t completely sure where he is, and then he is sure and he’s also horribly certain he’s going to find Molly’s body slumped somewhere in the room.

And then he realizes it’s just his sinuses staging a small rebellion against the dry air. He takes a shuddering breath and rubs at his eyes.

“Good morning,” Hannibal says, with exactly the same inflection as he’d had greeting Molly in the dream, and Will _cannot_ be here right now.

He pushes his way hastily out of bed ( _away from Hannibal)_ , fumbles at his sling until it comes off, so he can put a real shirt and jacket on. His shoulder hurts dully, but that’s not something he cares about right now.

One quick, almost accidental glance at Hannibal reveals that he is simply watching with quiet consternation. Will takes a slow breath and makes himself pause. Hannibal could be talking right now. It’s better that he’s not. “I need - I’m taking a walk,” Will forces out. It’s more defense than courtesy; he’s angry, but Hannibal isn’t responsible - _immediately_ responsible, anyway - and this doesn’t need to escalate. “I’ll be back.”

There’s no sign of Chiyoh as he barrels his way toward and through the front door, and he’s glad for that. She wouldn’t necessarily make him explain, but she would make him feel like he needed to.

The morning outside is cold and clear. There’s still the odd patch of snow hanging on from what would have been deep drifts a couple of months ago, and Will stops for a moment beside one to run his fingers over the slick, bumpy surface and feel the bite of it against his skin. It feels like a welcome back into the world, and he briefly thinks about that instead of what drove him out of the cabin, out of Hannibal’s presence.

But then that moment passes, and he’s back on the winding trail down to the lake. (The cabin has a tiny pier, but no boat, which is a shame. He would have liked to go out on the water, especially this early in the morning, when it’s almost preternaturally quiet, except for the odd bird call.) The dream seems to cling to him, as if Molly was picking her way along the trail next to him, though he doesn’t look, for once. He doesn’t want to risk seeing her dead again.

Abigail’s apparition, however, is more tenacious at his other shoulder. “Remember what Hannibal said about compassion?”

He huffs a breath out his nose. “Yes, and that he said it about calling you up.”

“Yeah, but I’m not here to make it hurt more, this time, and you know it.”

“Yeah, okay.” He doesn’t look at her, though.

“What would you change, if you could?” she asks, as the lake comes into view from between the trees.

“That’s….” Will sighs. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? I should have figured it out before Dolarhyde went after them. I _could_ have, if I’d been paying more attention.”

“You think so?” she asks, with affected neutrality.

“Yeah, I could have.”

“You also could have realized from the start that going back to Hannibal had a chance of hurting them, just because of how you two are.”

“I… thought it would just be because of what it would do to me,” he agrees with a bitter twist to his lips. “Not anything quite so literal.” But Hannibal is nothing if not creative, particularly when it comes to violence.

“Or you could have told her more before you even got married,” she points out, after he’s been quiet for a moment.

There’s a pang of real guilt, and Will finds himself glancing sidelong at Abigail with a pained smile. Movement that must be Molly ghosts in his peripheral vision, but she still doesn’t speak. “What happened to that compassion?” he half-jokes.

“Hey, you’re obviously feeling guilty. Might as well figure out exactly what that’s about.”

They reach the pier, and the gentle lap of the water against the pebbly shore sounds like an unearned glimmer of heaven, while Molly’s as-yet-unacknowledged presence at his left feels like an equal glimmer of reproach.

“I should be angrier at Hannibal,” he notes, finally, eyes out on the water. But that’s not even _right_ ; he doesn’t actually feel that way, most of the time, as Abigail swiftly points out.

“That’s getting old, isn’t it? How angry you don’t stay at him, and feeling like you should?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, “it is.”

“You forgave him for killing me, twice. You forgave him for stabbing you, and for trying to kill you, which weren’t even the same thing.”

“I did,” he agrees quietly. “And I don’t - I’m not sure I’ve entirely forgiven him for this, yet, but I know I will. You’re right, though, I… should have told her.”

“Yeah, you really should have,” Molly finally says from his other side. “But nothing for it, now. There won’t be anyone else you’ll chicken out on warning.” There’s almost a smile in her voice, and it makes him shudder. The real Molly would be furious with him. Is probably furious with him.

“You’re right, I won’t make that mistake again,” is all he says, and it’s not nearly enough, but it’s what he has.

“Does it matter?” Abigail asks from his other side. “If she hates you.”

Will can only smile again. The breeze picks up, the cold stinging. “Yes, it matters. It matters because I know how much it would hurt her, too.”

“Can you do anything about it?” she prods, knowingly.

“Probably not.”

And there it is: the stark, uncompromising understanding that he needs to let Molly and Walter go. Guilt or love - neither will serve them, or himself, now.

He realizes he’s been twisting his wedding ring around on his finger for the entirety of this conversation. Slowly, feeling a sick sort of relief, he finally works the gold band off. It’s held in front of his eyes for a moment, and then it goes into a pocket, where it seems to faintly burn through the fabric against his skin.

“I’m going back inside,” he says simply.

“Okay,” Abigail replies. Molly says nothing, and he’s losing the sense of her presence with every step he takes back up to the cabin.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal subtly avoids him for the next several hours. Breakfast has apparently been had and cleaned up while Will was out - which says he’s been out longer than he meant to be, but it’s not surprising. Conversations with ghosts have a way of contracting or dilating time.

By five in the afternoon, though, there’s a tension like a beast with its hackles raised, prowling about a too-small cage. When Hannibal speaks from across the den from him, it’s an odd sort of relief.

“Are you harboring regrets, Will?”

He has to smirk, then, to himself, dark and festering. “Not… any recent ones.”

There is a measured pause. “There is much you would change about the past, if only you had the benefit of foreknowledge.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Hannibal purses his lips, ever so slightly, and glances toward the window. “Of course. But as I believe I have noted to you before, sometimes the beauty lies in a lack of predictability. While I admit I’m not fully immune to grieving that which might have been and was not, it’s not in my nature to dwell on it, the way it is yours.”

“Would you change that about me, if you could?”

“The pain it causes you in the present moment and any time in our future, yes, Will, in an instant. But not the underlying predisposition. That, I think, is a product of many of your features that I cherish, and to remove it would be to remove a great many other things.”

“Mmn,” Will sighs through his nose. It’s a more satisfying, even touching, answer than he’d have expected, had he paused to form any expectation at all. But perhaps it shouldn’t be. One thing Hannibal has been unrelentingly ( _infuriatingly)_ consistent about is his positive regard for the core components of Will’s personality. It’s one of the things that drew Will to him in the early days, like a moth to a flame, then kept him there even after the flame had singed his wings.

“What was it in particular that drove you out of the house this morning?” Hannibal asks, because of course he does. In an odd way it’s a welcome reminder of how Hannibal can’t quite read his mind, even as well as Will can usually read his.

“Molly,” he replies after debating a deflection. “I had some… unresolved regrets. I think they’re mostly resolved now.”

He can feel more than see Hannibal’s eyes on his newly bare left hand.

“Mostly?” Hannibal prods after a moment, and Will raises his eyes to stare him down fully, for the first time all day.

“She doesn’t get hurt anymore,” he says slowly, deliberately. “Not by us.” It’s a command as much as an entreaty.

“I harbor no animosity toward Molly Foster,” Hannibal says blandly, and that pointed use of her name as it was before she’d married Will and adopted a ‘-Graham’ is briefly vivid with a jealousy that Will understands uncomfortably well.

“Good,” he acknowledges simply, and the ephemeral beast smooths its fur and curls up again to sleep.

Between dinner and bed, when the sun has just sunk far enough below the horizon to abolish the last thread of orange, Will stands by the lake again and commends his wedding band to its cold, indifferent depths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I *wanted* Will to say "No psychoanalysis in bed," but alas, that has too many extra implications for this stage of the game. (And let's be honest - that's not a rule Hannibal would be able to keep.) :P

**Author's Note:**

> I take prompts for fic and meta on Tumblr as [@questionablygourmet!](https://questionablygourmet.tumblr.com/)


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